Perth and Kinross Council archives provide inspiration for Kyra’s exhibition

Mar 19 2010 Perthshire Advertiser Friday

A UNIQUE multi-media art exhibition entitled Artist in the Archive, based on items from the Perth and Kinross archive collections, will open this month at AK Bell Library and Perth Theatre Artspace.

Artist Kyra Clegg has created a collection of innovative artworks and video installations inspired by photographs and documents from the archive.

Perth and Kinross Council’s archive collections, kept at AK Bell Library, date from the 12th to the 21st centuries with documents ranging from medieval parchment to electronic files. The exhibition uses the archive to shine a light on unusual aspects of Perth’s history, using themes of identity and memory.

An example of the work on display is a piece inspired by the Anderson letters, which provide a fascinating glimpse of life in the early 19th century These love letters from the archive, as well as being passionate, also show how concerns regarding women’s property rights, when a woman’s possessions became the lawful property of her husband, could influence the development of a relationship. Work inspired by the Anderson letters will appear inside books in the romance section of the library.

Kyra said: “There are so many interesting fragments in the archives. I thought it would be intriguing for some of them to ‘escape’ into the general section of the library where readers would come across them inside appropriate books.”

Other archival documents which inspired the artist include early photographic records of petty criminals who emerge from the gloom in a series of “portraiture” boxes entitled ‘Timelocks’. Including ‘the notorious hen thief’ these prisoners were jailed for what today we would regard as minor misdemeanours.

Two videos ‘Talking Archives’ in which archivists Jan Merchant and Steve Connelly discuss the archive, and ‘ReCollections’ which gives an overview of the archival records, will be showing on the library’s computers and on the archive’s webpages.

The exhibition, funded by Perth and Kinross Council, runs from March 26 until July 15 at the AK Bell Library, and then from April 3 to August 10 at the Threshold Artspace, Perth Theatre.

For further information on the Perth and Kinross Council archive you can look up www.pkc.gov.uk/archives