I’ve been to the Tower Museum store – a warehouse where their collections and everything that goes with them is kept – twice now, wandering around just taking pictures and thinking. More so than looking for things I’ve found myself thinking about how we look at things. I’ve ended up using the store as a massive test space for thinking about how I want to interact with objects and imagining how I could allow other people to interact with the things I make. 

I really enjoyed a lot of the writing that I came across as I moved from room to room, from discarded exhibition text to hand written notes to labels on boxes and drawers:

 

9 Blotter 

12. Waste

2. Japanese paper up to 12gsm

8 Parchment 

10. Museum Board 

6 Western Paper Text and Coloured Paper 

7 Leather

1. Archival Tissue

3. Japanese paper 25-40gsm

5. Western laid papers 

11. 2mm green board 

4. Moulin du Verger

 

1 PAIR OF BOOTS

4 PAIR OF SHOES

 

ITEMS to Find.

 

WRECKS AND BREAK UPS

 

My brain lingered on this last one, bemused, for an embarrassingly long minute before realising the line below it said “OF SHIPS IN LONDERRY”.

What immediately caught my eye were all the materials that accumulate around preserving, showing and explaining all of these objects: shelves with waxes and polishes, cotton buds, empty aluminium takeaway boxes, off-cuts of foamboard, paint, clear sandwich bags and all the different kinds of papers for mounting. It helped me realise that I’m interested in the equivalent in my studio: the materials that I’ve gathered in my historical miniature making; the different grades of static grass, foliage, sand, scenic glue, shades of coloured A1 card, spray paint, and a collection of empty small black boxes. I’m interested in these materials for themselves and I’m excited about using them a little more abstractly, letting them take centre stage. If my little exhibition feels anything at all like being let walk around the Tower Museum store I’ll be happy. 

A few weeks ago I was on a little research trip to Cologne and while I was there I of course had to go searching for the local modelling shop, Technische Modellspielwaren Lindenberg. To the point above, I’m now walking around these shops like they’re an art materials store, imagining what physical and conceptual texture they might bring into the work. They had the entire range of NOCH model landscaping products, a veritable gold-mine for my purposes, and on the wall this fantastic board headed: “The wide range of NOCH Grass Fibres” above a grid of sample patches ranging from 1.5mm “Spring Meadows” through 2.5mm “Ornamental Lawn” and “Forest Floor”, all the way to 12mm Wild Grass XL in golden yellow. Already playing into ideas I was having in the studio I enjoyed imagining that this sample board was there to touch rather than just to see, running my fingers over the fuzzy rectangles. Presented in this format they aren’t really mimicking anything, they’re just textures – the texture of a summer meadow or a forest floor.

As the board says, there certainly is “the perfect solution for every application!”