Describing Architecture

archive folders_RED watercolour 628DA13_DE-12_685

Archive Folders / Jennifer O’Donnell

2012
Watercolour

This drawing is a reaction to the condition of archive, and in particular to the collection of art collector Egidio Marzona. In his archive, the most precious works are contained in row upon row of black lever arch files adorned only with tiny red labels.

Letters, drawings and photographs (being in themselves part of the ordinary, everyday) are given an inflated value by their value to society and to art. Eventually they are housed, permanently, in something as normal as their own beginnings. The drawing attempts to express the sense of accretion, the creation of pattern, and the ordinary, household scale that results from this form of storage.

Scale, in this case, is determined entirely by the container rather than the work itself; furthermore the container gives no clue as to the contents. Watercolour was used as a medium to reproduce the feeling of pattern, system, repetition that arises.

 

Images:

1    Drawing

2    Exhibit in context