This is a photo of my brother and sister reclining on a quinzhee. I remember the day we built this one and another at the end of our driveway which provided shelter while we waited for the school bus. I don’t remember ever fighting while building quinzhees. Quinzhee’s are amazing. I slept in one once. You can build a fire inside if there’s a hole at the top. But I digress…

At one point this photo of my siblings and the quinzhiee was stored in a magnetic album – you remember them, self stick albums with clear cover sheets? If you have any magnetic albums, you might want to remove your photos from them; even after these were removed, they continued to deteriorate. There’s some helpful information here and here if it’s not already too late.

I’m not fussed at all that mine are damaged since the collection was included in Monica Lacey’s Curiosity: a love letter to abandoned houses, a recent interactive installation that was part of Art in the Open, 2013.

Lacey seems to be a big fan of deterioration and decay. I suspect she likes thinking about how we view and cherish precious objects and the role patina plays in story-making: how dings and bruises are part of a memory object’s narrative and history. Actually, she may never think about this stuff, but this is the stuff I think about when I look at her stuff. And really, it’s all about me.

Anyway, I think Monica Lacey is great and I think she should watch The Tale of Two Tables. It features furniture designer Elliot Gorham of noddy boffin reflecting on ‘the stuff’ mentioned above – all but the quinzhee -while doing some pretty nasty things to art objects. In my opinion, it’s ten or so minutes well spent.

And you might want to watch it too; you can use the time to get a jump on removing your own memory objects from those horrid, sticky albums.