As a junior curator, I spent many hours copying entries from the catalogues of auction houses. Once initiated into this rarefied world, I came to love the precise and repetitive vocabulary, describing each object in detail and also attempting to convey the sublime importance of each item.
Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts takes the language and format of the auction catalogue, and applies it to the trajectory of a relationship.
The book uses the descriptions of these items to draw out the heady days of early courtship, the increased joint emotional investment in the objects that form the backdrop to their lives and then, the ways in which the significance of these objects evolve to become rather more bittersweet mementoes of a relationship running into troubled waters.
I was totally gripped by the narrative arc of this book and, as a curator of objects, I particularly admire a novel that places the objects at the centre of the story and uses them as the entry point to draw us into the lives of the people who owned them.
We often talk in museums about the “power of the object” and this book certainly reminds us how it is possible to “unpack” a compelling story of human experience by exploring the objects that are left behind.
Arabella Calder is the lead curator and project manager of the historic photography project at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales
Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts takes the language and format of the auction catalogue, and applies it to the trajectory of a relationship.
The book uses the descriptions of these items to draw out the heady days of early courtship, the increased joint emotional investment in the objects that form the backdrop to their lives and then, the ways in which the significance of these objects evolve to become rather more bittersweet mementoes of a relationship running into troubled waters.
I was totally gripped by the narrative arc of this book and, as a curator of objects, I particularly admire a novel that places the objects at the centre of the story and uses them as the entry point to draw us into the lives of the people who owned them.
We often talk in museums about the “power of the object” and this book certainly reminds us how it is possible to “unpack” a compelling story of human experience by exploring the objects that are left behind.
Arabella Calder is the lead curator and project manager of the historic photography project at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales
