Visiting Museums Sheffield’s storage facilities, we were drawn to the double life of the collection as materials “performing” when on display and as items held offstage, waiting on shelves and in cabinets. Behind the scenes, the collection seemed banal – watchsprings scattered in a drawer, or taxidermied birds covered in polythene – but also more alive.
Our work often concerns taxonomy and categorisation, systems of language and naming, visual similarity, clustering and association. We were fascinated by glitches in the system: index cards referring to lost and found items and records for keeping track of items of unknown provenance or lacking contextual information were interesting as holes in a methodical narrative.
Our photographic works, made on-site, recorded textual ephemera including handwritten labels on boxes, Post-it note reminders about the location of things and paperwork regarding damaged items.
When selecting items for display, we first looked at groupings of objects that draw the viewer into observing difference and sameness. We featured incredible lantern slides of pressed marine specimens made by HC Sorby in around 1900, a grid of aerial photos of the M1 from a 1962 archaeological survey and a large case of dismantled pocket watches.
We then linked unrelated objects through their visual and material properties – size, shape, texture – to create a vitrine featuring everything from ornate toast racks, Roman coins and accordions to puffer fish and puppet heads.
What Can Be Seen – a collaborative project by Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat that reimagines Sheffield’s museum collections – can be seen at the Millennium Gallery, Sheffield, until 7 May
Our work often concerns taxonomy and categorisation, systems of language and naming, visual similarity, clustering and association. We were fascinated by glitches in the system: index cards referring to lost and found items and records for keeping track of items of unknown provenance or lacking contextual information were interesting as holes in a methodical narrative.
Our photographic works, made on-site, recorded textual ephemera including handwritten labels on boxes, Post-it note reminders about the location of things and paperwork regarding damaged items.
When selecting items for display, we first looked at groupings of objects that draw the viewer into observing difference and sameness. We featured incredible lantern slides of pressed marine specimens made by HC Sorby in around 1900, a grid of aerial photos of the M1 from a 1962 archaeological survey and a large case of dismantled pocket watches.
We then linked unrelated objects through their visual and material properties – size, shape, texture – to create a vitrine featuring everything from ornate toast racks, Roman coins and accordions to puffer fish and puppet heads.
What Can Be Seen – a collaborative project by Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat that reimagines Sheffield’s museum collections – can be seen at the Millennium Gallery, Sheffield, until 7 May
