'The Shock of the Old' - Solo Sculpture Exhibition. 2023 - Wells and Mendip Museum, Somerset.

Why as artists do we persist with anachronistic models of display, collection and mark- making? I am researching anachronistic cultures of collecting and the accumulation and ordering of mnemonic materials in museums and those that many of us collate within sheds and attics through the lens of a sculptural art practice. With a particular focus on the use of taxidermy, diorama, natural history collection and archaeology I am interested in collapsed methodological boundaries and the potential that these liminal spaces provide for creative play, equivocal reading and message making.
These museological modes have emotional and associative worth because we link them to memories and moments, evidence of a lived experience and it is my position that the control of such materials betrays our vulnerability in the face of the inevitable entropy of all things, and by association an acknowledgement of mortality. I note that it is in the small things, the prosaic marginalia of a life lived, that the narrative is often told and am investigating the potential of the anachronistic creative device to compress or disrupt timelines.
These narrative mechanisms, as deployed by artists are playing with our interpretative functions, asking us to consider perhaps ethical, cultural or ecological factors in ways that the institutions of display habitually deflect us from. It is the very ‘out-of-time’ ness of these conventions that disrupt our assumptions and, by disabling linear readings, provide a new frame for story-telling. Knowingly deployed chronemic elements within visual arts practice can appear antithetical as they cause frictions with contemporary narratives and in so doing prompt interpretation and reappraisal.

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