Boxes are
both things in themselves and repositories of an interior world of
artefacts, materials, sounds, social processes and so on, but also of the
possible and the unexpected (which may include emptiness of course).
A museum is
similarly a container in which a nation, a people, a locality creates a kind of
chimerical patchwork identity
entrance Swansea Museums Collection centre
inside Swansea Museums Collection centre
Much of
my childhood was spent in the family antique shop with its strange gatherings
and juxtapositions of objects. For me, this was a personal and domestic, not
commercial environment.
So it is the relatively intimate collections of smaller museums, with their sometimes less ordered narratives, that interest me most. They can be more organic, with a quirkier, wilder
and perhaps more complex story to tell of locality and the human psyche.
For example, at Cyfarthfa Castle, Merthyr you move effortlessly from a mummified head
For example, at Cyfarthfa Castle, Merthyr you move effortlessly from a mummified head
to an emperor penguin
Cyfarthfa Castle Museum and Art gallery
past a cabinet of ironwork sample pieces, to the very first automated ballot box.
past a cabinet of ironwork sample pieces, to the very first automated ballot box.
The style and function of a box suggests an era and a locality as well as delimits aspects of a personal and social identity.
Freedom Box, Newport Museum & Art Gallery
Pay Box, Newport Museum & Art Gallery
I'm interested in the way this idea links with the image of the museum and gallery, each of which is also a kind of box, a repository of the artefacts through which a nation, a people, a locality tells its own stories.
With warm thanks to staff at:
and to Arts Council Wales - see earliest post
