Agnes & Karl
I heard a story that the last objects in the Hallwyl collection to be catalogued were the work coats worn by those doing the cataloguing. These coats are filed as “Tools etc. for the collection”, a curious and inspirational categorisation: if a tool is an instrument used to perform a task, what is the function of these garments now? What do they enable us to do and what might they tell us?
Shaping Stories, group exhibition, Hallwylska museum, Stockholm 2024.
Handling the coats from the archive I understood things I would never have been able to grasp from the description or the photographs in the catalogue alone: the texture of the fabric, the seams that give a clue to construction, the physicality of employees Agnes Carlsson and Karl Andersson even though they left us a long time ago.
I spent a lot of time looking in the photographic catalogues at forms and patterns to draw from, their traces finding their way on to these re-imagined garments. I wanted to bring attention to the overlooked yet intimate relationship between workers of the Hallwyl Palace – those who handled, documented and categorised its contents – and the collection itself.
When displayed in the museum’s Picture Gallery, these garments shared space with fine art, repositioning utilitarian objects and classed bodies to sit at the top of the cultural institution, symbolically and literally. It also invited reflection on dress, identity and institutional hierarchy from the museum staff, many of whom were previously unaware of the coats’ existence or significance.
This work is an exercise in learning from objects; whether in my developing skills making clothes or in the physical copying of the painted decoration on a broken tile by craftspeople unknown, or in what the coats themselves might reveal about their previous wearer. Clothes as tools and archival tracing of previous lives.