EVOCATIVE OBJECTS

Evocative Objects.

What is the Sir John Barrow Cottage? (And other questions.)

We met today at the cottage to look for  lines of enquiry and for ways in which each artists initial ideas and specialist knowledge might serve the others.
  It was a useful and lively discussion..excerpts from the transcript will be appearing here..as will contributions from Alex, Ellie and Jamie as their work progresses.

 The responses of participants in the last couple of projects and of visitors to our events clearly demonstrate the value of the cottage as a resource for schools and as venue for small scale events . Alongside these, visitors to Green Lane's open days have told us of  personal associations with the cottage. People like it.

 In a way, each of the latter is visiting a different building; they mention familiar elements, the change in scale caused by the 20 year gap between visits, they enjoy the restoration work, the information and objects and in some cases the absence of more information and objects...this enables the identity and purpose of the building to remain fluid,

unco-opted. Even by ourselves.

So the answer may be that the cottage is many things to many people, but in saying that we create the need for a further explanation that refers to its role in the narrative of the town and its people; to our relationship with the materiality of the past, and to the exchanges we undertake with the evocative objects that mediate individual and communal memory.

Initial ideas include an examination of photographs and the construction of tableaux in which the  past and present can be seen to co-exist through juxtaposition ; maps and the act of mediated exploration  as representations of a moment in a shifting relationship with place; the effects of collection and cataloguing on objects isolated from purpose or context.

Within this enquiry we might frame not just the objects (and the myriad objects that constitute them) but the cottage they inhabit; the impulses and actions of donors, UTC, the Civic Society and the effect of inaccessibility on (first) the buildings (and then) the collections evocative power. Are these elements  acting independently of us? And might  creative interaction  rise from a popular recognition of the cottage as a zone where we are subject to their agency.

The Cottage demands our engagement with absence. Barrow wasn't here for long. The garden may have grown over something left behind; some trace  might reside in the timbers and the rubble walls and (maybe) the medicine chest , but if so it resides alongside the other traces,including the tangible evidence of the building's life as a shop, its role as a repository for co-existing histories, and as a restored building to visit and appreciate..

 We need to look at this further, but a brief conversation with Dan from Greenlane provided important backstory regarding the relationship between the cottage and the town to which it was bequeathed.
As a shop the cottage was a part of the local economic structure, its history was less important than its current purpose and may have been subsumed by it. If so, this echoes the impact of Barrow's overseas ventures ..the commodification of routes and places, the imposition of trade conventions and temporal regulations.(..opening hours, for one.)

When the shop closed the building waited to be reclaimed by the town, and the longer the wait the stronger and deeper became the claims made on it by communal memory and imagination.

Here and elsewhere in the town, collecting and labelled by the Civic Society,  relics from decades apart sit against each other. Personal effects from parlours and cabinets sit alongside wartime utilitaria and the signage from the town limits.

There is a strange glamour at work here.

This is early doors, and this is just me reporting on the morning's talk and offering some thoughts, any of which  may be contested by the artists. Hopefully we will arrive at something coherent and cohesive, relevant to the place but also to any other examination of communal memory and its mediators.

 More conversations are needed, involving Dan and the Civic Society, and whoever comes through the door to talk to us.
Look out for the details of open sessions beginning this month.