The Phantom Museum

‘One of the most poignant aspects of the world of inanimate objects is their longevity. They endure and we do not…they are unspeaking witnesses that can never tell us what they have seen…’ (Hildi Hawkins and Danielle Olsen 2003: vii)

I have been reading a book called The Phantom Museum, and Henry Wellcome’s Collection of Medical Curiosities. The book links to my interests in telling stories about objects and collections - here are some quotes from the book and some of my thoughts:

‘The Wellcome Collection is a vast repository not only of objects, but traces of physical sensations, ideas and emotions, a reliquary of thoughts and fragments of memory. The soft, fleeting and ungraspable stuff of life is conjured up by matter of an altogether different nature, now lying inert in an anachronistic institution and very slowly turning to dust.’ (Hildi Hawkins and Danielle Olsen 2003: viii)
…collections as containers of memories… finding ways to express those narratives in a way that is subtle enough to be suggestive; allowing the viewer space to imagine….
Ideas of dust bring to mind the dust on butterfly wings - something physical that is fleeting, insubstantial, ungraspable – if you try and touch it, it will disintegrate. One must be gentle with these things and these thoughts
…ideas of poetics and object as metaphor (the image of a butterfly has appeared in my print designs as a way of lightly suggesting this sense of insubstantiality, these echoes of the past that can become embodied within an object.)
‘...this book is full of subtle resolutions, quiet shifts towards the light.’ (Hildi Hawkins and Danielle Olsen 2003: xiv)
…writing and exploring with a lightness of touch…not being too heavy (link to lightness discussed by Gaston Bachelard in poetics of space?) – this allows for subtleties for the little perhaps unnoticed things to be noticed remembered and treasured…

Creating imaginary narratives that are sympathetic to the objects and their history, yet also go somewhere ‘other’ – beyond their literal physicality.
‘Here in the Phantom Museum, the objects are investigated using a different method, that of the sympathetic imagination.’ (Hildi Hawkins and Danielle Olsen 2003: ix)
‘Our fiction writers …were priming their imaginations with a thorough grounding in the known facts about their chosen objects – although very often that knowledge was incomplete.’ (Hildi Hawkins and Danielle Olsen 2003: xi)

In October when I drew objects at Helston Folk museum the labels on the objects I drew affected the way I related to and understood the object; with no label you are lost…or perhaps completely free to make your own story…
In the Wellcome collection: ‘Some of the most mysterious objects now even lack the labels which might once have helped us decipher them; their meanings have become impenetrable.’ (Hildi Hawkins and Danielle Olsen 2003: ix)

…ideas about random types of classification – how do I classify the objects I use as inspiration for my print designs?
In the collection in Blythe House in Hammersmith ‘objects are classified by room – Glassware, Oriental, Surgery – giving rise to a higgledy – piggledy arrangement in which snuff boxes rub shoulders with mourning jewellery, ear trumpets with dentists chairs and anatomical models with human bones’ (Hildi Hawkins and Danielle Olsen 2003: x)

… in my work… illustrative print designs, combine imagery and text, real and imaginary narratives… grounded in factual research and fragments of real information…lightened by imaginary fragments… suggesting – allowing the viewer to engage with the work to develop their own personal response and narrative… when these prints are applied to an object in a design context – is it perhaps a way of making an object more than just another thing…to become a thing with a soul, with the ability to ‘speak’ and tell part of its story?

References:
Hawkins, H. and Olsen, D. [eds]. 2003. The Phantom Museum, and Henry Wellcome’s Collection of Medical Curiosities. Profile Books.