I was one of seven international metal artists invited to participate alongside sixteen from Portugal in an exhibition and symposium at the National Museum of Art in Lisbon. The brief was to establish a dialogue with the collection, the environmental space and the idea of a museum. It was my first opportunity to interact in a direct way with historical paintings in a museum setting, a significance enhanced by Portugal's decision to showcase contemporary metalwork in the capital's most prestigious cultural arena with an enormous viewing public, raising visibility and debate around applied arts practice. The installation resulted from my research investigating the relevance, appropriateness and meaning of site-specific works. The 'triptych' of metal wall-hung plates aimed to reveal the physicality of metals, their weight and mass; their surfaces (patinated, matt and polished); their forms using geometry, and the relative values of particular metals such as silver and brass. It connected with the domestic objects in the surrounding paintings, with one of the three elements also curling round a corner, asserting its relationship with the architecture.

This research exemplified my interest in how form is generated in art, design and architecture, drawing on abstraction and the play of metaphor in visual creation. The title of the work, Subjectivity and Objecthood No 1 acknowledges the further research question addressed: how to combine the objective, rational realm of geometry and the subjective, intuitive realm of the poetic imagination to reveal how art, through its transformations, mediates and re-presents the world to us.

There were over twenty sponsors including the Gulbenkian Foundation, Ministry of Culture and Mondriaan Foundation and British Council. Government representatives, cultural attachés and the British Ambassador to Portugal attended the opening at which I gave a lecture.