Inspired by British neo-classical architect Sir John Soane’s eccentric approach to collecting, London based architect Mat Barnes and contemporary artist Harry Lawson have collaborated on a quirky commission for the John Soane’s Museum. Exploring the ‘relationship between architecture, objects and time’ the pair have designed and curated three cabinets filled with obscure contemporary objects.
Architect Barnes, who founded his studio CAN in 2016, designed the cabinets for the exhibition as vessels of expression in themselves, just like Soane’s characterful house punctured by lightwells and bespoke adaptations across three terraced houses. The museum is a life-sized cabinet in itself packed with a veritable feast of sculptures, paintings and busts.
The first cabinet is a façade, the second a scaffold, the third a tomb representing the three concepts of the cabinets (All that was; All that is; and All that could have been). Each is a testbed for materials, aesthetics and techniques – from a cheap crackled paint surface, to beautifully buffed scaffolding pipes, or recycled car tyre chippings set in flexible resin and painted matte blue on the outside and black gloss glitter inside. Believe it or not, Barnes is using the latter technique in his house extension too.
The three cabinets display redundant objects of the past, obscure representations of the present and totems of an unrealised future. Barnes and Lawson sourced some of the curious keepsakes from their own personal collections – top-drawer treasures found, pocketed, forgotten and preserved. While some objects are borrowed from the Soane collection.
You’ll find a set of false teeth, a World Trade Center group admission ticket stub, a fragment from the Soane Ante-Room skylight removed in 1991, a Casascius Bitcoin, a spray-painted softwood block and a model of three cork columns available to purchase at the Soane Museum shop.
In our eagerly streamlining digital world, data storage seems infinite whereas our homes are only getting smaller. There’s humour and a powerful nostalgia in this collection of contemporary objects, archiving into history at a quickening pace. §
