Fictions

Sally Madge

The work consists of nine sculptural assemblages titled Fictions which incorporate elements of my own archive and constitute a taxonomy of personal responses to the task set, acting as reference points for a performance lecture: Stuff of Dreams as part of  the event ‘Mapping the Return’ to take place on 19th of September 2013.

Along with a study of objects gifted to the early Literary and Philosophical Society, the following ideas have fuelled my research:

“The collection is a form of art as play, a form involving the reframing of objects within a world of attention and manipulation of context. Like other forms of art, its function is not the restoration of context of origin but rather the creation of a new context, a context standing in a metaphorical, rather than a contiguous, relation to the world of everyday life”.

Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1993.

“It is because he feels alienated and disconnected from the social discourse whose rules elude him that the collector seeks to reconstitute a discourse which he understands, because he is then in the possession of the signifiers, and the signified is within his own experience”.

Jean Baudrilard, Les Systemes des Objets, Gallimard, Paris 1984.