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| https://lostandfoundexhibition.wordpress.com |
The project is twofold; It is a great way for me to explore and work with found objects and collecting, something I have always been drawn to but struggle with as I prefer to have a lack of clutter, I have since resigned myself to the fact that as an artistically inclined person this is next to impossible!
Also I am interested in the spectrum of meaning of both loss and discovery, sometimes trivial and novel, sometimes profound and life changing and with this I am trying to look at everything I can along that spectrum. So as well as having physical objects and things in the exhibition there is space for more literary or less physical entries. So, as a collector I am gathering all of this into an exhibition and blog, collecting and displaying the experiences and finds, losses and stories of as many people as care to contribute.
The idea for the exhibition and theme of the project started with two things, my bike was stolen, I found it some months later abandoned in some bushes close to campus, I returned to retrieve it some days later and of course, it was gone. Later a friend of mine left something on a bus and was in a different part of town over a week later and found it lying in a field.. after these two things I thought I really wanted to find out what other stories were out there.
Here's the blog I am doing for the external part of the project and exhibition and the one to which people can contribute, there are already some great submissions there, all studio/uni related critique and writing will be on this one though.
Badges I designed and had made for the exhibition
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| one of my more recent finds, a photograph of a painting. |
Some articles and my reading list for this project:
http://www.walkwalkwalk.org.uk/2ndlevelpages/FoundObjects.html
http://www.lainitaylor.com/2013/09/writing-and-found-objects-and.html
http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/we-ask-the-experts-why-do-we-put-things-into-museums
an artist working in the environment with found objects https://artistatexit0.wordpress.com/2014/05/
my question exactly! Why do people collect things? http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/downloads/mclass.pdf
the Lost colony of Roanoke
Photographing fragments of New York City's past
Exploring the project critically and asking the questions:
note: the below is a rewrite, I spent hours on a long piece of critical writing and, as luck would have it the lovely computer crashed and I lost the lot.. irony, of course. Press save every ten seconds!
....So my big question with this is more than one question, as usual for me narrowing things down to a single selection of anything is nearly impossible.
Why am I drawn to collect the objects that I am? What inherent value, if any do I see in them? In general the individual objects themselves, whether a pile of rusty nails, a broken plastic toy or a shipping tag from a box of unknown freight, have no great value yet they are interesting to me. Together as part of a collection they become more worthwhile, more interesting, more worthy of retaining. The more there are the more value the collection gains.
What are these things, these fragments and pieces once they or the larger thing they have broken away from have outlived their usefulness and their purpose, are they merely debris and waste or are they artefacts worthy of retention? Who gets to decide what is worth keeping and what is not? Where are the museums of the every day, of course the design museum and toy museums, small & quirky ones exist but on a larger scale, but then is it necessary, is not the nature of this type of collecting best left to individuals who choose to focus on one area of interest. I think so.
This piece of work for example is called Timeline, and it is an ongoing collection of pieces of rusty metal, some of these are relatively new and some are very old, I add to this all the time and will display it in November for this show, larger now, the line longer & the time gaps filled in little by little. It is 2 metres long in these images.
I am a collector, a documentor, a gatherer and cataloguer, archiver, preserver and a saver of things for later that might come in handy, I'll not quite go as far as "bits of string too short to use" but who knows, obsessions will not listen to reason as we all know!
Much of this, perhaps comes from the fact that I dislike waste a great deal and feel that so much of what is wasted is needless and were we to look further into second uses for things we could resolve a great deal of our increasingly frightening resource issues. Having always been a firm believer in the idea that everything has another use, a second life I, probably futilely attempt to apply this to everything I see! At the very least the potential is there.
What is a collection but an almost forensic examination of things similar, for example at the moment I have a strange fixation on things that are blue and on balloons, popped ones lying in the street. I am collecting these at the moment and as enjoyable as it is it is also a bit annoying, it began really as I see bits of blue rope everywhere and I wanted to know why... funnily it is not bits of blue rope I have been collection but other blue stuff.
Another question here of course is what am I hoping to achieve with all of this, where is it leading? It seems unlikely that there will be a final product, a new object constructed from the fragments of the old, the likelihood of an end point or resolution to these questions is also not very likely. However perhaps it opens the way to creating a new kind of museum, look at temporary and small museums, different ways of exhibiting and displaying all these ideas and objects.
There is an archaeological approach also, I think we all like to look at something and expect it to be a window on another time, place or way of living. Painting and sculpture certainly do this, they are almost anachronistic in many ways, certainly the staid and stuffy classical sculptures seem so to many now and these collections, like museums are time machines, portals and memory joggers and as such we need them to help us remember our history, whether it is individually, as a society or a smaller group of people. They all matter, from large scale collections of human and animal bones and the remnants of our very evolution down to a set of badges from each year of a small club's existence, this is the stuff of us, it is who we are, where we have come from and what we have done.
So I am asking myself, what came first, the collection, the compulsion to do it or the need to document and archive things? did they develop together and are symbiotic or did one precede and thereby naturally beget the other? As they are, essentially two halves of a whole I assume the former.
Aesthetically I have always loved the taxonomy of museums, the classifications and sub-classifications, meticulous records and index cards, labels and scientific designations, the large cabinets filled with thousands of tiny fragments, each object no matter its size or age treated with the same reverence, the same care and respect, this, to me says that we care about our history, our culture and will preserve it. Of course picking up bits of stuff as I do is nowhere near as profoundly important or dramatic as this but it follows a similar ideal.
This part is quite significant really as just putting a group of things on a table and saying here they are is, clearly not enough. The method of their display, the presentation, does as much to add to their value and worth as the actual collecting of them, their being gathered and kept. I am currently mulling over many ways of displaying these little collections and objects and while researching came across, as usual, a few things that I had thought of, so I do not want to do the same boring cliched things but at the same time I think there is a fairly intuitive method of displaying certain things. for example I found these images of displays of collections similar to ones I have ( these two below are not my pictures)
snipped from my pinterest images for the project
One of my favourtite parts of Manchester Museum is the Ancient Worlds 3 gallery, the part on the mezzanine where the collections of shabtis and pottery fragments are, here are some bad mobile phone photos I took for a previous project.
So I think it is this concept and its accompanying aesthetic that I am drawn to and there is no way to achieve this other than to collect millions of tiny pieces of stuff. I think for the exhibit I will construct a display tray similar to the blue one above but from wood, I was going to use old printers drawers as well so I will think about this, the challenge is to present a great deal of stuff and fragments and not have it appear cluttered or overwhelmingly busy.
TO DO list:
- set up a "found object exchange" or several, and monitor what people take and what they give, look at what is valued and how the collection changes
- photograph every object in the collection individually and create a video sequence ( have the studio booked)
- continue to scout for submissions and invite people to contribute
- promote the exhibition a bit more
- engage with more local galleries and artists for collaboration ( I am currently connected with a few artists and groups in other countries)
- go through notebooks and tidy up ideas and thoughts
- get in wood shop and make some display frames and drawers
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| a few of the fragments I dug up on the allotment |
So far I have contacted many art galleries and museums around the world to gain an insight into their lost property procedures and a look at items.
Contributors, collaborators and people I have been talking to: left behind.
- http://foundmagazine.com/
- https://www.artsy.net/artist/jonathan-stangroom is a regular contributor via mail
- Jennifer Weigel is another regular contributor
- The Wonder Inn, the venue hosting my exhibition
- Lost Box an online lost property search site
- Walkwalk artists in London doing walking projects
