Lost objects find a universal message

In 1928, André Breton, the Surrealist poet and artist, published Nadja, a short novel. The narrative mentions the Saint-Ouen flea market and Breton’s fascination with “searching for objects that can be found nowhere else: old-fashioned, broken, useless, almost incomprehensible, even perverse . . . yellowed nineteenth-century photographs, worthless books and iron spoons”. The use of such “found” objects as artworks became a central part of the Surrealists’ method.

Here, Whitney McVeigh, who was born in 1968 in New York and who trained at Edinburgh College of Art, uses objects such as old records, books, photographs, a typewriter and an antique toy pram. McVeigh has spent 20 years collecting such objects and keeping them in her London studio. They may, as she puts it, be described as a “memory bank”. Photography, audio recording and written texts are all, in a sense, methods of storing and passing on memories and information. These are the memories of others, now long gone. McVeigh seeks to reconnect these found objects to their lost memories, in a series of sparse, poetic interventions. Solitude a Breath Away (a tiny pram full of glass objects with white residue) suggests some of McVeigh’s main themes — motherhood, loss, the passage of time and the fragility of personal histories.

Other works underline the idea of past childhoods. Lock is a pair of child’s shoes, perhaps Edwardian, placed neatly on the floor. Inside are two rusted padlocks. These objects connect us to a past, whose narrative we must assemble individually.

The Children’s Treasure House is a collection of books placed on a plinth, the title taken from a series including The Great Poetry Book, Vol II. McVeigh also takes phrases as a form of “found” text which, placed in a new context, accumulate new meaning.

A short film, Birth: Origins at the End of Life, made in St Christopher’s Hospice, London, records fragments of the lives of six women: each, at the end of her life, talks movingly of motherhood and loss. A sound installation, in which McVeigh enumerates the 6,857 days between her daughter’s birth and her 18th birthday, complements some of the main strands of this poetic exploration of some of life’s most profound experiences. As with the best art, McVeigh expands personal experience to connect with the universal.

To March 9, 2016