Collectors and Collecting

Unbound: Visionary Women Collecting Textiles was curated by June Hill with Lotte Crawford and with support from Amanda Game and Jennifer Hallam.

In the introduction to her article, Collectors and Collecting, in the exhibition’s complimentary catalogue, June Hill introduces the ideas surrounding collecting which are central to the Unbound exhibition, and also how these themes have been explored in previous exhibitions at Two Temple Place:

"Collecting is a conscious act of selection that takes something from one context and places it in another. The reasons that determine these choices are varied. For a museum, where acquisitions are made in perpetuity, the long-term public benefit carries considerable weight. Curators play an influential role in shaping such decisions, ensuring each piece is relevant, authentic and an appropriate addition to the existing collections.

A considerable portion of that pre-existing material will reflect decisions made by other individuals, with the Victorian vogue for collecting an important factor in the formation of numerous museum collections. This history was explored in Two Temple Place’s 2015 exhibition, Cotton to Gold: Extraordinary Collections of the Industrial North West, which examined the impact of eleven cotton barons whose philanthropic donations of objects and finance were pivotal to the establishment of three local authority museums in Lancashire.

The collectors in Cotton to Gold were typical of others who turned private possessions into public assets. This particular group of eleven acquired extremely fine objects: Roman coins, medieval manuscripts, Turner watercolours, Tiffany glass, Japanese prints, religious icons and ivory sculptures. These remain treasures in the museums where they are held. They also reflect a particular view of what constitutes a museum object: something rare and precious, artefacts representative of an accepted culture.

In Beyond Beauty: Transforming the Body in Ancient Egypt (Two Temple Place, 2016) the collectors were Egyptologists, and included several women. Two of these, Annie Barlow and Amelia Oldroyd, also used textile wealth to fund acquisitions for local museums. Like their counterparts in Cotton to Gold, Barlow and Oldroyd were also part of a wider network of pioneering collectors, in their instance women archaeologists and anthropologists, six of whom featured in Intrepid Women: Fieldwork in Action, 1910- 1957 an exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, (October 2018-March 2019).

Unbound: Visionary Women Collecting Textiles takes these themes a step further by focusing on seven women collectors active at different periods and in varied contexts. Taking textiles as a connecting thread, their work offers insights into the important role played by women collectors, the diverse reasons material is collected and the manner in which collection-based knowledge shifts and evolves over time.

There is always a subjective element to collecting, no matter how disciplined the individual and how clear the framework in which they operate. This can lead to idiosyncratic collections of random objects, fascinating but unfocused. A visionary collector, by comparison, brings an informed personal perspective that sees beyond the bounds of convention and extends known territory. This is a quality shared by all those featured in Unbound."

You can read the rest of June Hill’s article here in the exhibition catalogue.