Just the week before Siobhan blogged about Ai Weiwei’s massive installation of handmade porcelain sunflower seeds at the Tate Modern in London. I found myself wishing I could travel to London to see it in person, but I know that’s not going to happen. So I suppose coming across his show at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland is the next best thing.

I was really thrilled to see this work in person even if it only represents a small portion of the over one hundred million seeds the artist has in the Tate Modern installation. Most of the work in the show focused on the body of work the artist has created using urns. Ai Weiwei takes historic clay pots and porcelain vases and dips them into industrial paint or alters them in other ways. Some of these are up to 7000 (!) years old.

The other show on at the Museum of Contemporary Craft was Collateral Matters, an exhibition of ephemera and printed materials from the museum’s archives. I really like how the curators chose to display the wide variety of materials. There were also two stations where visitors could practice their hand writing or make something from paper and contribute their own ephemera to the show.

There are more photos from the Museum Of Contemporary Craft available on flickr.