Shaping the Archive I and Shaping the Archive II
Both Shaping the Archive I and Shaping the Archive II draw on the same body of research: a graph database built to map eighteenth-century Britain social and knowledge networks.
Shaping the Archive I draws on the tradition of the carefully arranged natural history specimens and cultural artifacts displayed within the gentleman's closet or Wunderkammer, where collection and presentation were themselves assertions of knowledge, status, and authority. In this installation the logic of this habit is reimagined: rare objects, once deployed to display intellectual and social capital, are replaced by data visualisations and information graphics mapping membership of societies, professional and political organisations, universities, and the authorship of scientific and educational publications across eighteenth-century Britain.
In doing so, the work borrows the visual language of collection and display, filling the space with data accumulated from primary and secondary text that maps the world its collectors inhabited. Yet what this collection transmits is not the prestige and authority of its forebears, but evidence of a society in which women were systematically excluded from the institutions through which knowledge was authorised, circulated, and preserved.
Shaping the Archive II Shaping the Archive II dissolves the legible order of Shaping the Archive I into a relational field where meaning is complex and unstable. Drawing on the same curated selection of nodes and relationships, paper charts expand into a three-dimensional installation that questions the distinction between central and peripheral figures, challenging structures that privilege individuals and singular achievements over collective participation and connection. Names are printed on individual cards, women in pink and men blue, a direct visual comment on the gender dynamics underwriting such structures, and mounted on two vertical panels. These cards are linked by threads spanning the space, converging and crisscrossing through a constellation of suspended multicoloured ‘nodes’ visualising the relationships flattened by two-dimensional graphs and tables. The viewer navigates this archive not as a static repository but as a complex web of connections; the threads and vibrantly coloured spheres merge to evoke a system of information that is at once rational, complex, and resistant to resolution.
While the installation renders a fragment of the database into three dimensions, it offers no singular narrative or linear explanation. What it makes visible is not the absence of order but the inadequacy of the orders we have inherited: networks too dense, too reciprocal, and too gendered to be resolved into the singular narratives that official histories require.
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