Things in Worlds

The objects are small: a skull, a chessboard, a half-peeled lemon, a glove, a parrot, a clock stopped at the wrong hour, a caterpillar eating a bouquet. The worlds they come from are not. A kitchen. A mine. A port. A courtroom. A marriage. A market. A war.

But look again and the two trade places. The objects are worlds: inside the lemon is a ship, a plantation, a ritual thousands of years old. And the worlds are objects: a whole century painted on a board, printed on a page, rolled up, shipped, hung on a wall, held in two hands, sold.

Objects travel, and worlds communicate, across times and across spaces. A thing passes through hands and houses and borders, and every room it enters changes what it is. A shell is a curiosity in one place, a currency in another, a keepsake in a third. By the time it arrives in a painting it has collected stories, and the painting gives it one more life, in front of new eyes, in a different world again.

Things in Worlds follows things out of the frame and back in. Each one holds a particular attitude to life: to what a home should feel like, to what counts as beautiful, to what a painting was for and who it was for. Looked at closely, a small thing turns out to be a whole way of living, and often one we still recognise.