Photo: St Olave's Chest, seventeenth century. Courtesy of Chichester District Museum.
Simon Goodall is inspired by an intriguing exhibition in West Sussex.
Unpacked is an exhibition at Chichester District Museum running until September 6. The project displays work by twenty local artists next to a museum object that inspired them.
Unpacked is about contemporary art meeting history. Artists translate artefacts of the past into works that both illustrate and question the value of those artefacts for the present and future.
Photo: My Heritage, by Astri Sharp. Courtesy of Chichester District Museum.
At first the exhibition is hard to distinguish as it is spread throughout a permanent display that features a range of artefacts from Neolithic flint to 1950s kitchenware.
One of the first pieces I spotted was Barry Holt’s ‘Arrowhead Zip’, which takes the simple shape of a flint arrowhead and repeats it to form a zip pattern on an oblong block, illustrating the endurance of ancient forms and their relevance to contemporary design.
‘Scraps of History’ by Jennifer Ulrich is a paper cast of an imaginary Roman column inspired by the stump of an actual column found in the area.
Photo: Roman column, a fragment from a Roman villa found locally and dating back to the second or third century. Courtesy of Chichester District Museum.
The piece explores the idea repeated elsewhere in the exhibition, of accelerated decay and the fragility of mementos. Her pillar is already decaying, with bits falling off her work almost blowing away in the breeze with the passing of time.
Perhaps my favourite piece was Astri Sharp’s ‘My Heritage’ based on St. Olave’s Chest, a 17th century oak storage unit, from a local church of the same name.
St. Olav is the patron saint of Norway and the artist made rubbings from her Norwegian Grandmothers marriage sheets on hand made paper to create a hanging of the national flag.
Photo: Scraps of History by Jennifer Ulrich. Courtesy of Chichester District Museum.
She has also created a scrapbook of the same material that contains a family archive, with letters and cuttings that pay homage to Norwegian resistance during the war and the support they received from the people of England and in particular the Bishop of Chichester.
Part archive, part delicately crafted artwork, this piece is an imaginative flowering from the original object and like so much of the exhibition, blurs the distinction between History and Art.
This exhibition was an unexpected pleasure found in the centre of Chichester and is well worth a visit.
