Display is an art of curating pasts, presents and futures; using matter to re-member experiences, memories, values and hopes. Mantles, shelves and framed displays tell these stories and send out threads toward a future hoped for our children and their children.

 

There is potential in the ways we bring stuff together, meaningfully, to share new directions based upon what we have learned (and unlearned)  from the past.

 

 

 

 

 

Photograph by Sia Duff

Courtesy of Guildhouse

 

Photographs of items in the collection of the Barossa Museum, Tanunda, South Australia.  With thanks to Luke Rothe

Examples of Barossa Folk Art. From top left: Hand-carved bracket/frame c. 1890s, foilwork by Hugo Ahrens mid 1900s,  Leatherwork frame c. 1880, mantle piece runner c. 1890s, German anniversary needlework kit (upon perforated paper) early 1900s, mantle piece runner

The Victorian era home was renowned for being highly decorated with clutter residing upon mantelpieces, shelves, dressers, window-sills, and walls. More than just stuff, this orchestrated clutter reflected a family’s values, heritage and aspirations, and according to scholar Celeste Olalquiaga created ‘fastidious arrangements’ where  ‘nothing is out of place and all the different elements participate in an obligatory meaningfulness’ (Celeste  Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1998). 89-91). In her unique study of Victoriana, Walter Benjamin, kitsch and dust, Olalquiaga suggests the practical purpose behind ornamentalism was to ‘cover the emptiness left behind by the absence of tradition’ (p. 89), an absence brought about by Modernity and by extension the mass-production of goods once bound to traditional modes of making. This absence was undoubtedly magnified in colonial Australia, far from the homelands of families and the cycles of intergenerational traditions.