The Mitre Owl - Exhibition by Joanna Whittle & David Orme

David and Jo asked me to write this introduction, mainly because of my job. I am a curator, I care for museum objects. I think the assumption is that because I spend my work life with collections, I would have a collection at home. Or a relationship with objects that would bring some insight into The Mitre Owl Collection.

Sadly this isn’t true, maybe because I spend my working life looking after objects on behalf of the public, I actually find the idea of having any sort of collection at home rather stressful. I can’t turn off the part of my brain that wants to constantly check their condition, record their movements, and organise objects into strict taxonomies buy type, material, and context.  I have a relationship with objects that could be said to be analytic. This leads me to ask what do artists bring to collections, to objects?

The thing that sticks out is that artists understand the objects as a material which is able to shift as they play with meaning by placing them in and out of different situations and contexts.

For instance, Alan Kane presented his mother’s collections of ornaments in the hyper capitalist environment of frieze art fair but did not offer them for sale.

Kane believed his mother’s ornaments were as worthy, as valuable for display and attention as the multi-million-pound art works alongside them at Frieze art fair, because the attention of his mother’s gaze onto her cheap mass-produced ornaments is as valuable as a millionaire’s gaze onto a expensive painting. Shortly after Kane was asked by a collector to rearrange and curate the house of her father who had recently passed away. To approach the detritus of a life lived, the objects he had lived with day in day out, with the eyes of an artist. Kane seemed to work with the memory of a life, the fathers attention and gaze held within these objects as his material. By looking carefully, by relocating and re-presenting these objects with care and by creating display mechanisms, Kane re-performed the act of being observed that these objects had been deprived off since their owner’s death.  It was as if by asking Kane to pay such care and attention to the objects of her father’s life, Kane’s own artistic attention, mirrored and magnified the care and attention her father had lavished upon these objects. 

Because in the end it is the attention, we pay to an object that creates its value.

So what does an artist bring to a collection?

An artist brings a special form of attention, a focus, not to decay or the historical importance of an object like a curator does, but an understanding of a life lived with an artefact, an understanding of the importance of the everyday gaze and consideration of the things we choose to surround us. Artists understand the importance of choosing to have objects you exist with.

This is an exhibition of the objects David and Jo Exist with, and for a short time they generously invite you to exist with them too.