The IM-PLE-MENT ARCHIVE, an ongoing collaboration between visual artists ELLEN KLECKNER and LINDA TIEN, defies simple and tidy explanations. It is simultaneously a collection of objects to be used, a collaborative method of making, an interrogation of craft practices and intersections, and an ongoing contemporary artwork. The Archive began serendipitously in 2017. Kleckner and Tien had met five years earlier at the Appalachian Center for Craft, where Kleckner was finishing her BFA while Tien was there as a resident artist. They became friends by proximity (they shared next-door cabins there), and later began graduate schools at the same time – Kleckner at Ohio University in ceramics, and Tien at Indiana University Bloomington in small metals. A trip to see a mutual friend’s exhibition in 2016 reunited the two, as Tien was now the curator for the Columbus Museum of Art and Design. Tien visited Kleckner’s studio where she discovered Kleckner was making ceramic spoons, and offered to curate them into an exhibition at the museum. “It was one of the first times that I gave my work to someone without controlling the curation or exhibition,” said Kleckner.
