The Collector's Set : The Fork's Tale, as narrated by itself
- Submitting institution
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University of Hertfordshire
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 24753138
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- London
- Brief description of type
- LemonMelon
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- January
- Year
- 2014
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The Collector's Set/Fork's Tale (2014) results from of a 5-year AHRC Research Fellowship with the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, (U Cambridge). Funded by Arts Council, the book contains 12 chapters (published in 2013) that comprise the 2014 novel. Written from the viewpoint of a nineteenth-century Fijian ‘cannibal fork’ in the University of Cambridge collection, the book records the object's attempt at understanding its collector who transported it from Fiji only to leave it in darkened storeroom. The product of an inter-disciplinary methodology, The CS/FT uses art-practice to interrogate assumptions in anthropology and ethnographic collections management, embodying physically and textually the process of accretion and aporias that shape collections. The 2014 CS/FT comprises an archival box with an unidentified collector's notes that demonstrate the collector's attempt to understand the anonymous chapters and what their various details might mean. Each is complete in itself, yet together they form a novel, which as the collection forms becomes more than the individual objects and chapters that comprise it. An accessible narrative structure is used to create a reflective, non-judgemental and open approach to examining colonial legacy creating a new and different relationship, whatever readers' own personal relationship to the British Empire. CS/FT was selected by David Senior, Elizabeth James and Sofie Dederen as Kaleid 2014 Best Book and was accessioned by the Metropolitan Museum, Chelsea University of the Arts library, the Brooklyn Museum, and Yale University.
The 12 published chapters were published in late 2013. The archival boxed set of chapters with collector's notes appeared as the the Collector's Set in 2014. Thus the substantive component of the research method - the idea that the work can be read in a non-linear sequence determined by the reader rather than as a standard narrative - was the result of the later 2014 publication.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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