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Dear friend of Arkadia,

You are invited to an Exhibition of Objects by Katherine Midgley on Saturday 7.9 at 4pm at Arkadia (Nervanderinkatu 11)

Katherine will present the works and talk about the use of archeological methods to interpret the present day: the ‘contemporary past’.

All are most welcome!

Warm regards,

Ian
www.arkadiabookshop.fi

–Entrance is free but a donation of €3 (or more!) to fund the event is suggested and would be most welcome.

An Exhibition of Works by Katherine Midgley

I will bring to the bookshop an assortment of objects found in London and elsewhere. It will be a varied collection: a jar of objects
found on the pavement outside King’s Cross Railway Station; a Neolithic flint scraper tool; a series of Victorian bottle stoppers, and many other things. Many of the objects were discovered whilst ‘mudlarking’ in the river Thames, a scavenging process that was first used as a way to make money and is now an important source of knowledge for amateur and professional archaeologists.

I am very interested in Material Culture: the idea of understanding a society or group through the objects and images it creates. This is interesting to discuss in relation to Art. Art is, in my opinion, a way of investigating the world and restructuring received information about it. As an Art student, collecting objects forms a vital part of the restructuring process. This could be seen as a form of archaeological investigation, albeit a non-standard one.

I will talk about the use of archeological methods to interpret the present day: the ‘contemporary past’. Can such investigations be used as a tool for social change? Each object that I will show has a story behind it. For me this is half the fun: unpicking the life of an object and the person who made or owned it. I would love to share these stories with you and also to let you handle and investigate the objects for yourselves, which I think is the only way to engage with their history.

Katherine Midgley is an art student from the north of England, who studies at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Katherine’s work has an anthropological feel, with strong links to history and traditional ways of making. She has always been a collector: be it of Stone Age arrow heads, ticket stubs, or bottle tops flattened in the road. This love of the material and of objects is central to her work. She is also greatly influenced by walks through London, a city with ‘layers’ of history and a tangled mix of cultures.