Believe me

Been thinking about Samuel Crompton’s bits of string too small for use…

In that moment of discovery, looking through a set of old brown files in the gallery office, we believed we had found something momentous (well, you had). And we had.

Something about Mary’s ‘believe me’ really excites me. Somebody spun those cotton yarns a long time ago. Somebody carefully annotated a series of small card tabs and wound the samples around them. And then went home and had tea. Maybe they got sent to Samuel Crompton. Somebody put them to one side, in a box or a drawer, and they became accidental survivors, archaeological fragments of something once real but now out of reach. And then, their potential really opens up. Such humble things become so potent.

I love the possibility, even if it’s only temporary and is shot down by research, that they could be the first yarns from the mule. That the reality of what they are is up for grabs. It’s the slippery-ness of story-telling, filling in the gaps between the bits and pieces with bits and pieces of other stories and making it momentarily true. Not a very curatorial response, more a romantic one.