Soap Object Walk

Object walks: a soap carving.

We share the museum collection widely, taking objects out to where people are. These encounters offer incredible depth and insight to the objects, from multiple perspectives.

People outside the museum shape and inform what happens inside the museum, their words, thoughts and feelings enable new stories to emerge.

We took the soap carving that inspired this exhibition to meet Martin from ‘by our hands we make our way’ in his studio workshop. This is what he said: Still slightly reeling from having these extremely powerful pieces of art visit the studio.

Three soap carvings, from the archived collection at the national justice museum. Tiny talismanic creations, made by prisoner(s) unknown.

These are objects carrying deep stories, history and feeling heaped so thick the weight was visceral.

Art made in stolen moments, from stolen pieces of the of machinery of confinement, tiny incised scratches betraying the hand of the maker trying to break out of something, making a new sense of the scentless prison soap.

To me they speak to the human urge to process experience physically, whether we are handed the means and materials, or whether they are taken away. Things emerge in solitude, the elastic, elongated time spent inside, resonating with wartime bone carvings & sailors scrimshaw. Tools, artist, medium all flow into each other in a slow motion meditation, ingenuity born out of the drive toward survival, or its opposite.

Another resonance: the soap being a way to clean things up, to wash away, scrub and scour... how many masterpieces we’re sacrificed as suds down the drain? .So many more layers to feel, to put back together: it would be interesting to trace the pattern on the back of the fragments, find out when the soap was manufactured... Analyse the carving marks to see if the same person made each one... Were they developing a style, a story, which was the first?

None of that! Who ever made these was just passing time! Making their way! Trying. To. Get. By. Till. They. Get. Out. So, in short, it was pretty moving meeting these things!

Thank you Left Lion magazine and Andrea Hadley-Johnson for sharing & fabrice gagos for taking pictures.