Steven Claydon – ‘The Outside In’ at The MERL

About

Melanesian artefacts from Claydon’s personal collection and new sculptural works will be introduced into the displays to explore how we attach meaning and narratives to objects in museums, creating mysterious collisions of cultures and contexts, questioning their utility and resonance in these juxtapositions. Claydon explores how the value of an object can extend from being a simple tool through to a more complex role as a spiritual or apotropaic implement, used to ward off evil in an English cottage or house the spirit of an ancestor in a New Guinean longhouse. Through highlighting their individual alterity, Claydon intends to demonstrate that the agency of objects across contexts speaks to their individual power as things.​