My exhibition BOX 15 is now live in the Robertson Davies Library at Massey College. If you’re in Toronto this summer, and interested in paleography, please do come by.
Installation images are coming soon. For now, portraits of a few of the stars:
And here’s the intro panel:
Legal charters in a Scots dialect. A letter from Queen Elizabeth I’s most powerful advisor. Parchment slips recording the lives of a tenant family in southern England. A battered handwritten ledger bound with uncut pages of a printed book for which no other record exists. How did they end up together in an archival box on a shelf 20 m behind this sign?
Box 15, the most miscellaneous in the Paleography Collection, was also, until recently, the least documented. Following clues found in books on our shelves, in archives local and international, and in records gathered by amateur historians, BOX 15 asks of each item in this unassuming white box: What is it? Who made it? What does it say or do? And how on earth did it get here? Sometimes answers are found. Often they can only be guessed at.
These material traces of lives once lived convey how complex the web is of cause and effect, choice and accident, even a modest collection sits at the centre of. Together they offer a taste of the paleographic adventure – a weird mix of archival research, forensic science, and circus trapeze act.
– Christopher Patton, curator
Up for a deep, deep dive? Here’s the catalogue.
The Art of Compost 