Lucy Harrison – The Absent Collector
Lucy Harrison – The Absent Collector
Exhibition preview: Friday 12 March 2010 6-9pm
Exhibition opening dates and times: 13-14 March 2010 12-5pm and 19-21 March 2010 12-5pm
with contributions from Rebecca Agnes, Kristine Alksne, Salvatore Arancio, Marco Palmieri, Stefania Sales and others
In a new exhibition for Crate, Lucy Harrison explores interpretation and coincidence through the stories of two people – one from 20th Century Italy, the other from 19th Century Margate.
In the first part of the show, which takes place in Crate’s Project Space 1, she attempts to piece together the biography of the owner of a collection of letters and postcards found on a roadside in Sicily.
The London-based artist was visiting Palermo last year when she discovered a carrier bag full of correspondence spanning 20 years. She returned home with the letters, intrigued by what they might reveal of their owner – and what they might withhold. With the help of an Italian speaking friend, she found parallels between the found collection and other ephemera belonging to absent family members which she herself owns.
Following this, she asked various Italian speakers in Italy and the UK, including in Margate, to translate more of the letters into English, and also to interpret and speculate on what the letters might have meant and what they reveal about the correspondents’ lives and relationships.
Her search for Italian connections in the area led her to a local story that casts a different light on what happens to somebody’s possessions when they die. In Project Space 2, Harrison investigates a pamphlet found in the Margate Local History Archive. ‘A Plain Statement of a Late Base Conspiracy’ is the confusing story of a man in Margate in 1837 who felt persecuted by gossip in the town about why his uncle cut him out of his will. The gossip was literally spread around the streets by graffiti and ‘printed placards’.
The Absent Collector is Harrison’s investigation into the process by which the belongings of one who is no longer there have new value judgments placed on them and are often disseminated to various locations and read without the previous owner’s knowledge of why they were kept, or of the specific relationships between the objects that determined their meaning.
By focusing on the idea of an unknown collector, the project considers how others may find or interpret items that were given away, and the way in which those that were kept now signify a void; the writer or receiver of letters no longer being present to clarify points or retell stories.
Harrison’s dissemination of the Sicilian collection is in part an attempt to explore how personal connections and family histories make objects meaningful: that when her collaborators’ input is gathered to form a new collection, it might create a portrait of the vacuum that is created when someone dies.
The exhibition also examines the act of ‘reading’ a collection of objects – whether they be letters, objects, photographs – highlighting the role of guesswork in the absence of the original collector, and the extent to which one’s understanding of collections is guided by one’s own desires rather than curatorial or objective agendas. Furthermore, it considers the impact that this act of reinterpretation can have in the real world.
The Absent Collector is part of Bad Translation, Crate’s programme for 2009/10. It is generously supported by Arts Council England and Kent County Council.
