Pop Up Exhibition:
Emotional Objects
December 6, 2019–January 5, 2020
Ellen Sampson is an artist and material culture researcher whose
work explores the relationships between bodies, memory, and clothing, in
museums and archives and in everyday life. She notes that the First World War
catalyzed multiple shifts in women’s lived experience: changes in social
structure, employment, and dress practices. The spaces women occupied, the
roles they played, and the ways they dressed all changed, so that as war
ravaged Europe, their tactile and sensory experiences were shifted and
reframed. It was equally a period of previously unparalleled loss, of lives and
of behaviors, of futures and of traditions; so much so that it is hard to think
of the material culture of that period as anything other than the material
culture of loss.
During Sampson’s residency and through her pop-up exhibition, Emotional Objects she will explore the material
culture of this change and loss through two everyday objects: the handkerchief
and the glove. They are emotional objects, artifacts required to convey, stand
in for, or embody emotion. These artifacts, mundane, yet overdetermined, are
bound up with the etiquette and traditions of courting and mourning, of private
and public, of work and of war. They are souvenirs, love tokens, and mementos,
deeply entangled with performances of love, labor, and grief. Despite
their ritualized and socially proscribed mode of use, gloves and handkerchiefs
are also deeply personal and tactile objects, often understood as indivisible
from those who used and wore them. They are Bodily objects, objects that stand
in for absent bodies.
The pop-up exhibition will be on view on the Fourth Floor of Bard
Graduate Center Gallery.
Ellen Sampson holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art. Using film,
photography, performance, and writing she interrogates the ways that garments
become records of lived experience. She looks closely and makes close-up images
to engage with the intricacies of wear, gesture, and trace. In exploring the
resonance of worn and used artifacts, she seeks to uncover how attachment to
the material world is produced and maintained. She was 2018–19 Polaire Weismann
Fellow at The Costume Institute - The Metropolitan Museum of Art working on a
projected titled “The Afterlives of Clothes.”