‘Re: New Wallace Collection #9: Ornament and Omission’ presents composer Matthew Whiteside’s immersive sound installation responding to the collection – through its archives as much as its objects, tracing the systems of labour, wealth, and administration that sit beneath the museum’s refinement.
Drawing on extracts from historical archives, items from the collection, and sounds of weaving and textile machinery, the work creates an immersive sound world in which elegance gives way to bureaucracy, repetition, and omission. The piece turns attention towards those largely absent from its narratives: the workers whose labour underpinned the wealth from which such collections emerged. In bringing together the language of record-keeping with the machinery of production, we invite audiences to listen to what has been seen as significant enough to preserve, and notice what has been excluded from those records.
‘Re: New Wallace Collection #9: Ornament and Omission’ is the ninth of a series of successful residency projects offered by R-Space to artists to carry out research about/at the collection and create an innovative artistic response to it. These projects also highlight Sir Richard Wallace’s historical and cultural legacy, and his connection with Co. Antrim and Lisburn in particular, where he was the local MP and land-owner.
