Cabinet

This virtual exhibition comprised several cabinets found in situ within a small abandoned house in Llandeilo, Wales. Through photogrammetry and CAD modelling, the objects were captured with a high degree of fidelity, enabling the experience of these cabinets within their original domestic setting to be translated into a digital environment. Accessed through a custom-built website, the exhibition functioned as both a display platform and an archival space, providing visitors with the ability to navigate the models freely and engage with the objects from perspectives unavailable through conventional photography.

Little is known of the cabinet's maker, beyond her reputation as an eccentric hoarder and a possible connection to British campaigns in colonial Africa. The contents of the cabinets date predominantly from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, comprising an assortment of graphically compelling ephemera: matchboxes, buttons, food labels, and brochures. A number of cabinets exhibit a more taxonomic precision, containing collections of wood-type letterforms or coat hooks, while one presents ceramic and wooden figures arranged in a childlike scaenae frons. The objects may have been acquired through her own travels, or simply collected for their visual allure.

The indecipherability of the cabinets permits them to function primarily as repositories for the act of collecting itself, wherein each object becomes an emblem of a sentiment too elusive to be fully articulated. Detached from any coherent narrative or system of classification, the collection resists interpretation, transforming accumulation into its own form of meaning.

Online exhibition here.