About

Exhibition
30 November 2019 – 30 March 2020
10am – 4pm daily

Artist Talk
with Yasmin Canvin, Lala Meredith-Vula, James Steventon and Richard Wentworth
Saturday 25 January 2020

The culmination of Abigail Lane and Lala Meredith-Vula‘s residency at Fineshade Wood recontextualises lost property collected in the forest, the artists working with Forestry England to reflect the human presence within these woods as well as our ongoing relationship with nature and managed natural spaces.

Our possessions follow us and the process of losing, finding, and handing belongings into a lost property point is familiar worldwide. Each of the ninety items which now comprise The Forest is the Museum collection were considered important enough to carry into the forest by someone and, once lost, identified by a passerby as something worth an attempt to reunite with its owner. Most items have little monetary value, but tagging and cataloguing the collection re-empowers these objects, imbuing each with new value and significance.

Notably, many of the objects are plastic, a material which survives long past our individual human lifespan and arguably beyond that of many of our natural spaces.

The installation and accompanying photographs project our current existence into the future, treating the everyday artefacts of our recreation as future archaeological specimens or articles of evidence.

This exhibition features the beginnings of a new body of work in collaboration with Loughborough University‘s Studio of Light, with artefacts from the collection forensically photographed and presented as incredibly detailed platinum prints, a highly specialised photographic and reprographic process that dates back to the 19th century.

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