The Archive is this kind of place that [has] to do with longing and appropriation. It is to do with wanting things that are put together, collected, collated, named in lists and indices; a place where a whole world, a social order, may be imagined by the recurrence of a name in a register, through a scrap of paper, or some other little piece of flotsam.
      - Carolyn Steedman

Personal archives are borderless and unlimited visions of the past and contain invaluable testimonials to the unfixed nature of our worlds. The objects within Enmesh (Madsen-Sylvester Studio 2nd December - 4th January 2025) are points of entry into disjointed and hospitable narratives. There is an entrenched connectivity within self and what we encounter through archival objects that opens internal and private passages: a collection of disused cloth, paper or metal becomes a means of constructing and understanding self-hood on top of disused artefacts. Although surrogates for the vanished past, it is the trust in the beauty and strength of these archives that has enabled a variety of artists and keepers to translate them all into new contexts. Despite its crumbling, shattering or disappearance, the vulnerability of the archival piece finds new power. Through the work of the artists, archivists and fashion designers featured in Enmesh I have traversed the ways in which these virtuosos have enfleshed archives and enmeshed themselves within.  Tightly squeezed together and pulsating separately within a small window, consider this a petri dish of precious components of the ever expanding worldwide dust hysteria and archive fever.

(to think it all started with Sarah McCormack’s boot related erotica)

Sarah McCormack