Contextual Review: Storytelling in Objects
/ Abstract
/ Introduction
/ Contextual Review
/ Attachments to Objects
/ Storytelling in Objects
/ Digitalisation of Collections
/ Methods Overview
/ Memory Objectification
/ Conclusion
/ Bibliography
Objects’ data provides detail and set the grounds for interpretation and speculation of their origin, purpose, and function. Gathering this information allows collection curators, such as museums, dataset organisers or visual communicators to create object associations and built narratives through the objects. Archival collections provide windows into timelines of individuals’ life events and offer the opportunity for storytelling.
Leanne Shapton’s ‘Important Artefacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelery’ (2009) presents an archival collection of Lenore Doolan & Harold (Hal) Morris’s relationship from their first meeting in 2002 to their eventual break up in 2006. The publication documents their relationship’s sequence of events to incredible detail through photographs, handwritten notes, personal belongings, and gifted items amongst others acting as the descriptive narrative. Each item may seem average or invaluable individually, but together they create a storytelling of value; a curated collection (Sadokierski, 2010). Audiences understanding their story is dependent on how deeply they invest themselves in observing the objects, their interconnectional value and associated metadata (description of item or how it came into possession) as “Archives are more than just classified documents; they hold power and require deciphering to present alternate perspectives”. (Vo, 2021) The pairing and sequencing of the objects and photographs with sparse descriptive detail provide audiences with parts of a narrative that through their own interactions, judgement and observation, are able to create the storytelling themselves like solving a loved themed mystery.
In relation to documentation being methods of storytelling, Megan Wong’s digital documentation within their ‘Tracing After Lives’ (2021) that highlights the depth of storytelling with a collection of objects. The project focuses on the impacts of plastic in environments, whilst the topic is not entirely related, their collection of documentations, archiving their project’s processes (that later became their Master of Design inquiries) utilises photography, material play, speculative narrative and participatory methods towards sense-making and dialogue. Megan is able to combine design research and storytelling to create tangible approaches to abstract issues, promote behavioural change and open up opportunities for discussion. Whilst research and design for a project is vital, from an audience standpoint, viewing and understanding the in-depth processes taken through exploring the documentation brings awareness to the narratives the objects themselves carry alongside the value of collecting processes.
Similarly, the book ‘Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories: Essays in honour of Professor Susan M Pearce’ (2012), is a wide-ranging collection of essays exploring the stories than can be told by and about objects and those who choose to collect them. Composed by an international and interdisplinary group of authors, led by Sandra H Dudley, whom consider the meanings and values imputed into objects alongside the processes and implications of collecting. Covering the ‘Mutuality between objects and persons’, ‘Objects meanings in context’ and ‘Collectors and collecting in focus’ (Dudley, 2012) it proposes that objects are not passive things but instead they actually participate in social relationships and are capable of carrying multiple potentially clashing narratives. They consider the entanglement of an object and the collectors in a web of social value and change, the object’s biographies and the strategies used to reconstruct and/or retell object narratives. A concern raised is the way museums present objects enables a specific narrative to be pushed forwards for audiences to observe and interact with that may not be true or accurate. This questions the matter of who decides what storytelling the objects communicate. Individuals can interact or react to the same objects differently depending on their own memories, upbringings, backgrounds or associations with the objects and highlights whether the narrative portrayed is the same one being understood and interpreted.
Mark Menjivar captures the varied interactions with objects dependant on the persons individuality in the photographic series, ‘Refrigerator / You are what you eat’ (2012) where the everyday object of a refrigerator holding food is captured and catalogued to create a collection of the same object that varies depending on the owner’s job, lifestyle or eating habits. At a glance this series merely documents the variety of eating behaviours but after analysis, it provides a window into the complexity of a socially and culturally influenced narrative. Through photography Menjivar’s work captures a domestic arrangement demonstrating that objects as simple as refrigerators can become legible as storytelling collections as audiences can interpret the material for indicators of personal, cultural and social lifestyles. They become a visual archive of the human experience.
Overall, collecting objects are important to museums, archival collections and material culture but shifting the viewpoint from object as artifacts towards objects as holders of narratives, memories, relationships or power structures throughout the collecting processes, on a personal and institutional level, enables the storytelling to be understood at a richer level. Objects in personal collections may not seem to be worthy of being in a museum in the present day, but they could eventually become narrative carriers of the ‘past’ as time continues forwards.
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