The Car Boot Museum

Woo new project (that kind of fits with all my old projects)! Combining two of my favourite things, personal archives and car-boot sales, this project will also tie in with my new penpal writing and illustration collaborations. I love pop up museums - I remember being in Berlin about 8 years ago and finding what seemed like galleries open at 2am that the next day were somewhere else. Looking back it almost seems like I was imagining things, but I'm pretty sure it was real. Later that year I briefly lived in Paris and I remember this room under the post office on Rue Oberkampf where I saw handsome boys apparently randomly building miniature wooden rollercoasters - I now know that it was a gallery, but I have never forgot the delight at finding art in such an unexpected place (though I have to say in this case I kind of wished it hadn't been a gallery but more of an art guerilla affair - handsome boys building rollercoasters for random fun is like my perfect dream!).

The Car Boot Museum will stop and pop up wherever it seems is a good place, be it the side of the road (I'm hoping a couple of foreign road trips can be incorporated), a car park, an empty field (cows deserve art too) or outside a friend's house, and the inside of the car boot will contain text and images, created by me and friends collaboratively, or found things that fit as an almost memory atlas that is illustrated anew by each place it is viewed in. I was also thinking a lot about the Mnemosyne Atlas (see previous post on said marvel) and how we collate images and link things in our heads. The black voids in the display here are as important as the images in that the space represents the "ghost links" between things that can be filled in by people's imaginations. This completion by the reader/viewer has always been an important part of my work and I hope this project will explore and enable some of these ideas further. I also love the idea of drawing on that feeling at car boot sales when you peer inside a stranger's car not knowing what treasures you might find... It has a treasure hunt quality which also fits with my projects! And a travelling cabinet of curiosities one...

Soooo... Who wants to join in?