Artist and the Collection: Re-Imagined

In Artist and the Collection: Re-Imagined four artists of national significance, Sue Henderson, Penny Mason, Sue Pickering and Anne Morrison, were invited to explore the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery history, science and art collections and create new works in response to their discoveries. New works were displayed alongside objects from the collection that inspired them.The exhibition Artist and the Collection: Re-Imagined demonstrated the value of the visual arts in grappling with complexities inherent in negotiating systems of collection, conservation and display. Inclusion of objects from the collection, re-contextualized within the artists practices offered new ways for an audience to engage with artefacts previously not on public display. Artist and the Collection: Re-Imagined extended beyond a match-the-object-to-the-reproduction type experience common to exhibitions responding to collections to a multilayered presentation, offering multiple interpretations. Shifts between artifacts and artworks, resonances between the diverse practitioners artworks, use of antique display cases and activation of the museum gallery space were crucial to the overall meaning of the exhibition. The objects became destabilized, a trigger for re-imagining both physical objects and processes of archiving and collection. This complexity is demonstrated in Sue Henderson’s Core sample columns were three structural columns were papered with artwork, drawing attention to the exposed brick walls and architecture. The papering of the columns with floral and mineral motifs and surfaces negotiated decorative histories of wallpapering and items from the natural history collection, while referring to ways of systematizing the natural environment and the physical structure of museums. Sue Henderson’s Gridded Time also imagines the practice of systematising moments in geological time, utlizing the Cartesian grid system of mapping and locating topography as a comment on how we order the environment.