The Centre for Contemporary Art is based at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, Lancashire and is the home base for a large group of research projects. It is led by Lubaina Himid, Professor of Contemporary Art and I met with her last year to chat about the dandelion project and how I could and should start to archive my collection.
Why and how would I put an order to this ramdom collection of stuff i've collected over the past few years (i've also been collecting other bits of wildlife - dead bees, wasps, butterflies, spiders - but that's a whole new blog i think).
How will I decide to categorise and label everything? I keep wondering why i'm doing this - if there isn't a botanical use for my dandelion collection, how else, if at all, will it be used?
Freestyle archiving might be the way to go I think.
The image here is by Cecile M Driffield from a book by Gareth H Browning published in 1938 called Botany For Fun. Surely there should be a question mark on the end of that title.
What's the point of a collection?
ReplyDeleteA crucial and seriously important question for everyone involved in art and the connections between "the art" and "the world". The dandelion project, as it is in this early stage, well has the potential to make us think about why we do accept some kind of collections (museums, galleries, foundations ...) whereas others seem to be rather equivocal. And it makes us think about the inside worlds of imagination in Museums we know and the outside world of reality in society and wether it does overlap and mix or what kind of things might cross that border.
Only art dares to connect and mix the non obvious and the dialogue between Rebecca and Owen shows, how things then spin off even if the beginnings are vague, blurred and somehow a little bit hazy.
from sunny Munich/Germany to my northeners
Thomas
That's very deep for a blog comment.
ReplyDeleteI love that Rebecca collects such wild and wonderful things. As a fellow archival enthusiast I can imagine it will only fully make sense to the archivists who uncover the who thing at the end of Rebecca's collecting.
One of my friends introduced me to the term "Concatenation" which describes the action of bringing disparate things together to create new meaning and is used a lot when talking about computer programming where new meaning and function is actually created through this process.
I like to think of my own work in relation to this definition and I think it fits Rebecca's work, particularly her collecting quite nicely.
Also, I Love the image!
E