The Naming of the Parts
These scanograms – images captured on a digital image scanner - represent a series of collections, many of which were donated as gifts from people living near former US military sites in Northamptonshire, including Harrington, Polebrook and Deenethorpe.
Chuck Leaning’s and Carl Bartum’s artefacts, including electric parts of bomber airplanes, emerged from the ground when ploughing the de-commissioned Ministry of Defence owned Harrington land in the 1960s. They were kept in a plastic fertilizer bag for his grandchildren. Patrick Duerden’s ‘findings’, taken from Polebrook in the 1970s, have been stored in a large yellow plastic washing up bowl and a wooden box marked ‘treasure’, with scull and cross-bones etched on the lid.
Glover’s image-making technique corresponds with archaeological processes. Placing the artefacts directly onto a flat-bed digital scanner its ‘digital eye’ finely combs each physical object, just as the archaeologist closely surveys land formations to find sites.
Anna Douglas
Edited extract from the catalogue of the exhibition An Archaeology of the Everyday Things, Fermynwoods Gallery, 2006.
