Electra Wilson

Artist Catalogue

Virtual Exhibition

The Things We Carry

Under the main theme of The Things We Carry, this body of work is an exploration of my relationship with a collection of objects, both inherited and collected by me. I amassed this collection through the passing of several loved ones, as well as due to the influence of my late mother’s hoarding.

I found that the example of the salvage of the archives in the Jagger Library fire and the example of the packing up of a loved one’s home after their passing seem to mirror each other. Furthermore, many of my previous encounters with the library, archives and museums evoked memories of the hoarded home I lived in while growing up. As a child of a hoarder with a conflicted relationship with objects, I am hyper-aware of my distorted perceptions of value. This, in turn, led me to question the value of the archive/museum collections, which remind me of a hoard.

Due to this, I gained an interest in archival and museological practices, which led me to look to museum taxonomy, classification, and display practices as sources of inspiration for the presentation of my own collections and installations. In doing so, I aim to conflate the collecting practices of museums/archives with the accumulation habits of hoarders to question the differing attitudes towards the two types of collections. My aim is to avert the attention from the objects and find different ways of interacting with/archiving these objects to question the processes used in the collection and storage of objects and documents in an official archive or museum collection. Some of the processes that I make use of include covering these objects in white fabric representative of a shroud, making hospital beds for the insects I have collected, creating an inventory catalogue with my own index system, and writing and censoring letters to the objects and memories/thoughts.

Through these processes, I hope to encourage discourse on notions of care and custodianship, the burden of care, value, access to these collections, and the desire to mitigate the loss of information, as well as challenge notions of what can be constituted as an archival object or document. There is ongoing questioning of meanings assigned to objects and how the significance of objects may change when they are part of a personal or an institutional collection, the necessity for memorialising and caring for these objects, as well as why or how objects become placeholders for notions of death, loss, grief, and memory.

In this examination of how museology and contemporary art can influence each other, I hope to make museums less a site for the passive consumption of hierarchical values and more an open forum stimulating discourse. It is a contemporary artistic exploration of how to determine its next incarnation, challenging the status and structure of the archive/museum collections.