CABINET OF THE LOST AND FOUND
by Patricia Volk & Stephen Volk
New Brewery Arts, Cirencester (2009)
"Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories" - Walter Benjamin
This collection of telling things was triggered by our joint memory of visits to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, with its drawers full of secrets, neatly catalogued and labelled for anthropological purposes. Unlike in a museum, however, with our own Cabinet of the Lost and Found, the viewer might be tempted to question whether some of the tales are true. (Some of them are.) But what's more interesting is what we want to believe. Or not believe.
All objects have stories.
The late Gordon Burn (writer of a book on Rose and Fred West and also a book on Damien Hirst) said that the British have trouble with conceptual art because they don't want to believe that everyday objects have a poetic quality. But the simplest of items, invested with a minimal narrative or "backstory", changes how we regard them. They are never the same again.
One of us makes objects...
Sculptural pieces that, in abstract or figurative form, strive to convey human emotions and relationships: imbuing in them the all-too human side of our myths and Madonnas, fragile heroes, icons and serene and spiritual Deities—or our precarious selves.
One of us tells stories...
Of ghosts, horror and the dark corners of haunted places and haunted people alike. Of crimes and traumas. Childhood and innocence. The shocking and the gothic and the supernatural. On the page or on the screen.
In devising this portmanteau of the peculiar—(the piece of furniture itself a relic from a spare room whose history is mysterious)—we have united in our shared love of evocative installations such as Susan Hiller's Witness, Peter Greenaway's Tulse Luper Suitcases, and the surreal extra charge given to a stuffed shark by its ridiculously extravagant title.
One of us remembers The Monkey's Paw. The other, that film in which antique shop owner Peter Cushing gives people cursed or possessed objects that exact poetic justice. (Not forgetting the sled called Rosebud.) Like an actor, the objects in our Cabinet might be pretending: but the actor, too, has a real history behind the mask.
CONTENTS:
Objects from the desk of Sleeping Beauty's psychotherapist.
Glass eyes used by a self-blinded man to woo a girl previously heard to say she would only marry a man with blue eyes, like her daddy.
Stone kept in the pocket of a woman who lost her child on the beach.
Money used to buy sweeties by a Russian abductor of children.
Hair of a dyslexic woman, and the trimmings of the articulate man she married.
The ration book of a man called Herring who, having served in the Royal Navy during WWII, felt compelled to return to the sea.
Retirement gift given to a Professor who endeavoured to teach language to feral children.
Kindly on loan from the Depository of Rarely Used Words.
Apparatus invented by a man terrified of being buried alive.
Blood extracted from a fallen angel.
Crucifix defaced by an amputee angry at God.
Gift from a Scottish woman imprisoned in Italy accused of witchcraft.
The only remains found after the spontaneous combustion of a hunchback.
Postcards sent by a man on the run after robbing a Post Office in Dundee, to taunt the police.
Boy who grew up to be an anarchist, and set off a bomb in a Paris Cafe.
Possessions of a man who, on a railway journey, sat next to someone who turned out to be his brother from whom he'd been separated at birth. Both now science teachers.
Books of prediction owned by a woman to whom many tragedies happened.
Lobster eaten in celebration of the birth of a much longed-for son. (Child - 7lbs. Lobster: 7 lbs.)
Bible from the library of a secret Darwinian.
Drawer of unfulfilled ambitions.
Wedding dress worn by a woman whose brother died in infancy.
The last breath of Ruth Ellis.
Saw used by a conjuror to cut his wife in half: subsequently used as a musical instrument at her funeral, after which it disappeared.
Portrait of a man disappointed in life after failing to sell his soul to The Devil.
Part of a weathervane struck by lightning, which impaled a priest.
Typewriter of a Foreign Correspondent who went missing in Tangiers.