Art and things: narratives of material culture

This essay takes a cross-disciplinary approach to contemporary art practices in which found-things are used to construct material culture narratives. As both an artist and archaeologist I focus upon the different practices of four South Australian artists who have in common that they all use, in varying degrees, discarded things as the raw material for their art. The use of found-things, being a form of material culture or human-made things, as the raw materials for art making is a twentieth century phenomenon which has grown and developed along with other disciplines that use narratives as a means to explain and interpret contemporary culture. The spread of narrative analyses and the emergence of the ‘narrative turn’ across many disciplines is part of a move from a specialised narrative theme as the subject of inquiry into a multifaceted structure within which a whole range of phenomena, including art, can be viewed and analysed. I discuss the artists’ work and practice through an archaeological framework of material culture studies as forms of narrative- making that imbue things with wider associations, memory and meaning.