Potter’s work has systematically returned to the enigmatic relationship between objects and memory; Love from Berlin traces her first encounter with The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Berlin). Regretting that she did not taking an impression from a ‘heart-shaped hole’ in the surface of one of the 2711 concrete blocks, Potter returns two years later and painstakingly retraces her steps, summoning the embodied experience of the physical monument. Potter is later able to replicate the void in gold: a ‘souvenir’ of a pilgrimage to a moment of lost opportunities, retrieved and restored through the process of making.

Matter is used here to embody traces of cultural forgetting and absence, as well as mobilising the poetics of gold as a metaphor for concern and care. The trivialisation of love is referenced in the title; indicating that the difficulty of concern lies in the powerful mechanism of forgetting. Tracing her subjective journey – remembering, feeling, returning, making and recording – Potter transforms the ‘object’ from a heart-shaped piece of gold, into a channel for the viewer’s own processes of remembering and oblivion.

UK craft is internationally recognised and Potter’s work consistently questions the values embodied by the idea of ‘British Craft’. In 2011 Love from Berlin was awarded a Jerwood Contemporary Makers prize, having been selected by renowned artists Hans Stofer, Freddie Robins, Richard Slee. This piece offered the Jerwood Contemporary Makers audience an opportunity to consider the meaning of cultural tourism and journeys of historical significance, whilst also challenging the perception of jewellery as an insular (constrained) preoccupation.

The exhibition toured the Jerwood Space (London), Naughton’s Gallery (Belfast), Innovative Craft (Edinburgh) and The National Craft Gallery (Ireland). It featured in Crafts (July/August 2010), The Independent (29th June 2010) and Design Week (27th May 2010).