The story of things

Carson, J; Miller, R

Abstract

The Story of Things explored the ideas of memory, collections and narrative. Engaged by a collection of historical scrapbooks (which in themselves encapsulated some surprising ideas of collections, memory and narrative) held by the museum Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections (UK), we utilised the conceit of the scrapbook as both a visual motif within the exhibition and as a metaphor for our experience of working with the Collections. We set about gathering evidence of our deliberately random and undisciplined journey through the rich and varied material held there.

The title deliberately embraces a dual meaning: firstly, the idea of ‘things’ having a story and that this story might be drawn out through the act of curation, and, secondly, a defining of our very particular act of curation in producing The Story of Things, which used the artefacts in a museum collection not in a traditional, ‘accepted’ manner but as artists’ materials that might be altered and played with through acts of stacking, overlapping, combining and separating. In doing so we deliberately presented misleading, misinterpreted or inaccurate accounts of the museum’s holdings, investigating Pearce’s idea that "Collections are essentially a narrative of experience; as objects are a kind of material language, so the narratives in to which they can be selected and organised are a kind of fiction…" (Pearce, S. M. (1995) On Collecting: an Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition, London: Routledge. p412.)

In the tradition of scrapbooks, The Story of Things – in its essence a three dimensional version of a scrapbook which used the gallery as its pages – constructed its own internal ordering and logic. We cross-referenced the collections, sometimes relating things by type, sometimes putting the unlikely together, sometimes remembering something we already knew, sometimes uncovering things unknown to us. In doing so we did not seek "...closure and establishment of meaning, but exactly the opposite, the absencing of meaning which, in turn, evokes an endless production of it, an endless production of fortuitous encounters…" (Allmer, P. (2009) On Being Touched, Manchester: MMU Special Collections. p iv.)

Citation

Carson, J., & Miller, R. The story of things. [artists' curation of museum collection]. (Unpublished)

• Exhibition Performance Type: Exhibition
• Deposit Date: Dec 21, 2010
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 21, 2010
• Related Public URLs: http://www.specialcollections.mmu.ac.uk/exhibitions.php
• Additional Information: Funders : Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections