As you lift the lid
from one of the hundreds of brown storage boxes in the Hartley
Library’s Special Collection, you can almost
feel history breathing…
There are over 6 million
items here, from the 12th Century to the present, and they all
once belonged to someone. You can’t take them with
you, but what significance do they have once the owners are
gone?
A modern-day collector, Laura Joy has been
recording the objects she finds in her daily path since 2003.
‘Cultural Archive’ contains over 200 indexed objects,
and a series of ‘oversize’ photocopied fragments,
raising issues about what is valued in our plastic age, and
if what is discarded says as much about us as what we choose
to keep.
In collaboration with Karen Robson from the
Special Collection, objects were chosen which reveal both something
of their original owner and a sense of accumulation across the
ages. In this collection of work, they combine with Laura
Joy’s archive to reveal fragments of our past
and present, suggesting that even within constant flux, some
things remain the same.
The artist would like to thank: Staff from the Special
Collection at the Hartley Library,
John Hansard Gallery staff, Dan Crow from Aspace,
Harry Cobbold and Hugh Adlam.
The Hartley Library is located on University
Road, opposite the Students’ Union,
and is open Monday to Friday 9.00am – 10.00pm, Saturday
9.00am – 5.00pm and Sunday (after 9 October) 12.00pm –
9.00pm. Visit the Libraries website for more information:
http://www.soton.ac.uk/library/
