Artist Johanna Bolton has started her residencey at the Borough Road Gallery archive and art store. She will be writing blogs as her research progresses concluding with a exhibition and workshop in October.
A special kind of silence seems to rest over all archives. We must come prepared with our own narratives to make sense of their baffling complexity. Mostly, we see what we look for and hear what we are listening for. Once we finish they fall back into silence, like a brain full of memories at rest, maybe dreaming.
I came to the A David Bomberg Legacy – The Sarah Rose Collection with a fascination for archives; labels, series and categorisation. An underlying narrative of trying to grapple with the unseen. Questions about choice and chance, and complexity.
Art collections have an interesting tension where the uniqueness demanded by an art work is subsumed by the context of the archive. There are many narratives clashing; the artists, Bomberg’s teachings, the collector’s intentions and chance encounters as well as what I bring, encountering it for the first time. I am looking forward to see what comes out of the cross-roads.
