I produced this sound piece in response to the collections at the Booth Museum in Hove. I recorded my foosteps as I looked through the archives at the Booth Museum of Natural History in Hove, on the hunt for a missing Melancholy Thistle. I then placed the sound recording in a drawer in the Museum, it's activated as you open the drawer.
Cath Grundy built a game in the Aris app which was a hunt/trail through the museum for the Melancholy Thistle via the objects on display, this was based on my own content which you can see on twitter, I documented my search here @booththistle.
Text produced for museum display:
Melancholy Thistle. Audio (1.49 mins)
Clare Plumley with support from Louis d'Aboville (tech), Gary Mart (sound) and Cathy Grundy (game design).
On my first visit to the Booth Museum I was given a tour behind the scenes: taxidermy, fish teeth, an accidental collection of vintage girly pics, printed plates and books as big as me, all these were presented but the thing that stayed with me over time was the Melancholy Thistle, what made it melancholy? I asked some time later about the illustrated plate that I saw, “there is no illustrated plate of a melancholy thistle” I was told. So I started to search. They were right.
The drawer contains a sound recording of my footsteps as I search for the thistle upstairs in the collections, it's activated as you open the drawer.
As I continued my search online I discovered that the Melancholy Thistle was named thus as it was used as a natural remedy for Melancholia, Depression as we now know it. I started to think about how hard we might search for a cure, particularly where there is none, and what we might pick up along that route. And so the project became all about the search, I was on the hunt, just like Edward Thomas Booth.
I started to map my exploration both within the museum and in my imagination. This has been plotted on the Aris app, a locative game. There you'll be given maps and clues to spaces that are always slightly out of reach, to ghost thistles and imaginary drawings, to the space above you and below your feet. We'll guide you to some spaces between and behind objects, to hidden details within the collection that might have escaped your notice.
I actually did find the thistle in the end but it wasn't quite as I remembered, there was a discrepancy between the real and imagined, what I was looking for did not really exist. How much are our memories our perception fiction, how do we construct narratives? How often do we search for things that can't be found? And if capturing the object we desire means sticking a pin through it do we then still really want it?
