archive-only

In the end everything I have learnt about the intersection of collection-holding practices with contemporary art can be expressed by drawing with pencils on paper. That which is simply drawn presents a formidable challenge to the material entity we call a museum object. Nothing in everyday experience comes close to the discomforting isolation of collected things, nothing better represents non-compliant objecthood - and yet my drawings can seem even more remote. At the point of creation they are so technically unencumbered there is little to support their presence in the world. Even my most laboured efforts have a remoteness that belongs, not to some unrecoverable historical past, but to the time in which the drawing did not yet exist.

As I curate projects and write about museums I also draw. Not to create artworks for exhibitions but to fold up and store away my creative actions in a condition that I think of as 'archive only'. This is a variant of the practice-led approach to art school research that has, I like to claim, expanded scholarship in the fields of museum studies and material culture. Collectors do treat my folded and boxed works as contemporary art, in good part because each drawing has online audio-visual letters that explore the significance of archival acts, but this contemporaneity is achieved without the usual apparatus of a gallery exhibition. As a result, there is no self-conscious moment of display, only an unfolding and enfolding with an opportunity to look in between.

fold-making
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drawing 5995.26

​box-folding
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drawings 5950.24 and 5980.8

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​audio-visual

drawings 5988.3 to 5991.24 and 5995.7 to 5996.14 (sample MP4 files of the kind posted regularly on the password-protected pages of this website)