48 right curly brackets taken from William Gardiner’s Herbarium volumes

48 stacked digital prints of individual right curly brackets to be held and looked through by the viewer. Made for the exhibition "Tales of The Unexpected",  held at The Lamb Gallery from August - October 2022.

Section of the exhibition statement:

"Discover some of the fascinating stories behind items in the University Archives and Museums. To mark Scotland’s Year of Stories we invited artists, designers and creative writers to explore our stores and choose objects and archives which inspired and intrigued them. This exhibition showcases their responses and brings to life the tales that run through our collections in new and surprising ways."

Artwork Statement:
Within the beautifully handwritten ‘contents’ pages of his Herbarium volumes, William Gardiner used right curly brackets to list the collections of pressed and dried plants which sat on each page. 
 
Before it is set in ink, the right curly bracket is a fluid abstract organiser mark. It sits within and helps organise line structures, but its movable height and form is only answerable to the specific collection it clasps.  
 
This mark simultaneously challenges and creates space, as its curved forms cuts through line heights and reconfigures the surrounding space it does not collocate.  
 
Its void, the only physically closed space visible within the mark, is its centre loop. A ribbon that symbolically wraps the bracket’s content and points to the categorization title of this claimed space. 

Process:

Like the plants they list:
Removed from their natural environment.
Pressed into paper.
Transformed into a collection.
Reconfigured in this new series of space to be observed.

Stacked pages:
Right curly bracket pages stacked like right curly bracket lists.
Not a sealed book but like a right curly bracket; an open space of listing.
The container inverted.

Viewers body as bracket:
Picking up and looking through the collection.
Cutting through the physical stacked space.
Does not create the collection but organises it.
Curating, editing, removing, Changing the work.
Becoming the knot that wraps and decides.