Artists are well-known pack rats. If you conjure up the stereotypical artist’s studio in your mind, it might well be a sort of wunderkammer of materials of creation, inspiration and detritus. Artists also use collections, archives and the more orderly functions of taxonomy as material and conceptual underpinning. What do artists and archivists have in common? What are you looking at? host Pip Stafford explores the tensions between the past, the now, the subjective and the relational as it rubs up against the real, human lives and inspirations of artists. Featuring artist Ashe, artist and archivist Samara McIlroy and Gabbee Stolp talking about grief, online scams, the unruliness of digital memory, and the Sydney Olympics.

To read more about Ashe’s Contemporary Art Tasmania exhibition, This Too Shall Pass and read Sebastian Henry-Jones’ B-Theory: https://contemporaryarttasmania.org/programs/this-too-shall-pass/

To read Gabbee Stolp’s Inventory: https://contemporaryarttasmania.org/journal/

The texts mentioned or quoted in this episode are (in alphabetical order of author name):
Sara Ahmed, Happy Objects, The Affect Theory Reader (Melissa Gregg and Gregory J Seigworth, Duke University Press, 2010), p 29 – 51
Kathy Carbone, Archival Art: Memory Practices, Interventions, and Productions, Curator The Museum Journal 53(2), 2020, p 257 – 263
Elisabeth Kaplan, We Are What We Collect, We Collect What We Are: Archives and the Construction of Identity, The American Archivist 53(1), 2000, p 126 – 151

Music for this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions.