On collecting part 6

As part of the On Collecting art project Sophie Skellern and Ruth Evans have shown an interest in what goes on behind the scenes, the storage, the restoration and preservation and the responses of visitors to the collection.


Julia Flatman, Senior Associate Lecturer, School of Visual Arts

Sophie Skellern

What’s that? is the response I got from most people when they interacted with the objects I had put together from the MoDiP collection. I wanted to enhance curiosity and trigger confusion. I laid out around 30 items that I labelled as strange, peculiar and weird and invited audience response. I sound recorded everybody’s reactions and put together this piece that I hope makes you feel the same element of puzzlement around identifying the objects, as the people who reacted to them did.

Ruth Evans

Every Museum or Art Gallery has a conservation plan to preserve the objects in its collection. The challenges involved in preserving artefacts and minimising deterioration was the focus for this study. The Museum of Design in Plastics was the main foundation of research used, looking at plastic artefacts that have deteriorated whilst being in the collections care.

Acrylic paint has a plastic content, and is a relatively new material, which has meant that Art galleries are still exploring how to preserve and clean works within their care. I have explored the effect that household cleaning products have deteriorating the surface of an acrylic painting, while highlighting the apparent irony of an image that has the quality of painting by numbers requiring restoration and preservation.

On Collecting part 5

As part of the On Collecting art project  Fran Stewart and Bev Miller have responded to the material qualities of Plastic as an art making material, for the production of sound or as a sculptural substance.

Julia Flatman, Senior Associate Lecturer, School of Visual Arts


Fran Stewart

  

My focus for this body of work was plastic itself, generally viewed as a non-biodegradable substance raising issues of consumerism and recycling.

The Museum of Design in Plastics, houses a vast collection of objects which raise questions about the difference between valuable / precious artefacts and objects normally considered worthless and thus discarded, due to their mass produced status.

In an attempt to recycle this material I have experimented with melting down mass-produced packaging and moulding the substance as sculptural forms. Reconfigured, the plastic takes on the quality of fragments of artefacts or geological sections. There is still evidence of the logos, symbols of the product they endorsed, fragments that are culturally revealing.

Bev Miller

PLASTIC MUSIC

I set out to make a sound piece using only the sounds that plastic objects make.  I wanted to avoid using existing plastic instruments or trying to create an instrument out of plastic.

I used a Zoom MRS 802 8 track studio and an AKG C100S condensing microphone.  After laying down a percussive track I then added in other sounds.

Plastic used to make sounds included - marker pens, plastic jars, empty bottles, beads, a torch, a ruler, plectrum, Sellotape, a comb, polythene sheeting, bubblewrap, a carrier bag and Velcro.

The outcome is four mixes entitled Polythene, Bubble wrap, Vinyl and Perspex.

On Collecting part 4

As part of the On Collecting art project Kayleigh King and Sian Bush look at the nature of collecting itself, the human desire to collect display and tell stories with objects and images, but also as an obsessive-compulsive behaviour.


Julia Flatman, Senior Associate Lecturer, School of Visual Arts

Kayleigh King

Inspired by my grandmother who was an avid collector of pill boxes I was interested in how everyday items end up in museum collections. What determines if an object is worthy of preserving and displaying? Is it value due to age, ownership or what it can tell us of our culture?

These personal keepsakes, charged with memory, indicate an obsessive collection of one type of object, they speak not only of the person but also of a culture. Their individual value in unknown but once part of a collection the artefacts afford a status greater than their individual parts.

By recording them as photographs in a grid and displaying them ‘on mass’ they loose their personal qualities and take on an institutional format.

Sian Bush

My main inspiration for this piece was a collection of paper based writing and imagery that spanned from the 1940s to the present day donated to MoDiP by Tim Coward.

It included newspaper clippings from the Second World War, train tickets and small trinkets. I loved that objects relating to important aspects of history are given the same authority as a sugar cube or a camping receipt. I used the ideas of consumerism, compulsive hoarding and personal archives versus museum archives and I attempted to convey the passion of collection and the eventual turn around, where possessions begin to own and take over the collector’s life.

On Collecting part 3

As part of the On Collecting art project Pascale Wilson and Rachel Di Biaso deal with ‘truth and untruth’, by mimicking classification systems and display devices.  Pascale has created a mythological creature and Rachel responded to existing artefacts with a contemporary revision of the form.

Julia Flatman, Senior Associate Lecturer, School of Visual Arts


Pascale Wilson

Museums have the authority to tell us what is fact and what is fiction, and the public is very much required to trust what is presented to them. I was inspired by scientific records from the 18^th century (pre-digital recording), which were always based on personal observation despite being presented in museums as flawless fact. The style of presentation I’ve used aims to mimic fact while the materials and content reveal invention. It is a comment on the fallibility of history; it aims to subtly and humorously undermine the authority of a museum by presenting a fictional yet believable creature.

Rachel Di Biaso

The museum itself provides an atmosphere of authenticity and value to the objects it houses. These official truths are often unchallenged or contested.  The artefacts within seek to demonstrate both ethnographic and anthropological understanding. By selecting a variety of genuine Museum artefacts I sought to construct contemporary equivalents using the same devices of labelling and display to confer authenticity.

On Collecting part 2

As part of the On Collecting art project Rachel Benjamin has explored museums as spatial systems that contain or frame everything they exhibit. The arrangement of the displays, the plinths and the labels are all formal constructions affected by the surrounding elements, other objects, lighting and colour.  Arthur Owen has created new objects in response to those in the collection; in the form of his own unique handmade plastic board game characters, to counter the mass produced object.

Julia Flatman, Senior Associate Lecturer, School of Visual Arts

Rachel Benjamin

When visiting a museum, we are often so interested by the objects on show that we neglect to appreciate how the artefacts are displayed. I was interested in the presentational apparatus. These images are a small selection of photographs taken on visits to Winchester Cathedral, the Wallace Collection in London, Pitt River’s Museum in Oxford and Reading Town Hall.  The purpose was to make visible the elements of display, the vitrines, the architecture and space, the positioning of the artefacts and the lighting.

There is a beauty in the reflections and shadows created by the lights and glass, which goes unnoticed.

 

Arthur Owen

These figures are made in response to my observations of industrially produced board games and lovingly produced horn ornaments. The rules and rough shapes of the figurines were tailored to function in a board gaming environment. The designs of the figurines represent my collective socio-political observations. The game is a vehicle in the modern information world war to help the leftists win one meme at a time. Memes make up the narrative of the board game.

On Collecting part 1

As part of the On Collecting art project Amy Forrest and Alison Board consider the status of artefacts. The use of the glass display case as a magical device to transform collections or worthless objects into valuable works of art. The vitrine becomes integral to the work sculpturally and spatially. They are concerned with setting a thought process in motion. What kind of treasures would we place in such a box?

Julia Flatman, Senior Associate Lecturer, School of Visual Arts

Amy Forrest

 

As humans we collect all sorts of things; family heirlooms, letters from loved ones, comic books. Our lives are filled with collections that are probably worthless to other people.  So, why do we feel the need to preserve them?  This question was the starting point of my work that aims to explore why we attribute value to certain objects.  Why do we keep them in museums and personal collections? Are they really worth saving for future generations to see?  Do we want to live on through them? Or do we just want someone to value them like we did?

Alison Board

We connect to our past through artefacts. These artefacts may be materially valuable, historically priceless or solely precious on a deeply personal level. They may be owned by us, or familiar by association. Is the language of an artefact universal? Do we question their authenticity when they are presented to us in a formal manner? Does their authenticity matter when they help us to recall a memory?

How students and staff use the collection #5 - On Collecting

As part of the unit ‘Articulating Time and Space’ BA Fine Art level 4 students were offered the opportunity to respond to the Museum of Design in Plastics.  Not specifically to the collection of plastics but to the idea of Museology.  Museums, the classification and systems for archiving–which relate to taxonomy, archaeology, ethnography, anthropology and material culture have been a constant source of inspiration to artists. They are aware of how the conventions of the museum turn all artefacts, whatever their background, into potential works of art. Once an object is removed from the everyday and placed in a museum context it is bestowed both status and the stamp of authenticity.

‘On Collecting’ considers personal, professional and institutional collecting. It refers to the accumulation of objects, methods of display, cataloguing, hierarchy and the culture of material things.

The project resulted in a variety of responses;

·         artefacts both real and fictional

·         interventions with exhibits

·         interventions involving historical artworks as a way of starting new visual  dialogues

·         the quest to explore both the rational and the irrational.

To view the students' work please see the blog posts entitled 'On Collecting'.

Julia Flatman, Senior Associate Lecturer, School of Visual Arts