The Lumber Room- series was created for the Armitt Museum and Library Centenary Exhibition 'Sublime Transactions'. The show has contemporary responses to the Armitt Collection by fifteen artists: Hannah Alton, Sir Peter Blake, Christopher Daniels, John Ellis, Paul Farley, Karoline Hjorth, Derek Horton, Riitta Ikonen, Russell Mills, Kate Morrell, Eileen Ramsay, Carole Romaya, David Toop, Ian Walton and Jon Wozencroft. 31st March 2012 until 22nd March 2013. Private View 30th March 2012 6-8pm, Rydal Road, Ambleside, Cumbria LA22 9BL.
The Armitt Museum is only able to exhibit a fraction of its rich and diverse collection at any one time. A great proportion of its archives are boxed and stored, classified, neatly labelled and preserved out of sight, waiting for their turn to be revealed.
Beyond its public library, hidden from view, its reserve library is a labyrinthine maze of tight floor-to-ceiling shelving, densely packed with uniform rows of books, some wrapped in tissue paper, like fruit in a greengrocer’s. The wrapped oranges, those carefully arranged at the top of the pile, always seem to be the most exciting ones; the especially fantastic, luscious ones, selected and arranged for their promise of surprise and wonder.
In response to these lovingly wrapped books, isolated from the Armitt's main collection, which is bursting at the seams, The Lumber Room is a series of photographs of newly created and invented objects, unknown pleasures at their source of origin in the natural world. Enveloped in the sublime and epic landscape, patiently maturing and waiting to become Armitt treasures, they present conduits from the past to possible futures.
