Inventory, 2023 is a quiet meditation on time, materiality, and the overlooked narratives embedded in the everyday. This project documents a collection of humble household objects – accumulated, arranged, and situated in a specific space – each bearing the subtle weight of use, memory, and neglect. The installation unfolds not as a pristine display, but as a raw, intuitive composition. The objects appear abandoned to time, yet reassembled with care, suggesting both reverence and reclamation.
Plates, bowls, vases, trays, tins, teapots, containers, cups, and other domestic vessels are gathered and presented as if on makeshift altars. Set atop rough timber shelves or nestled against worn, weathered walls, these objects are not presented as relics of the past, but as carriers of presence. The walls themselves are part of the story -battered surfaces marked by stains, scuffs, and fading layers, which document the slow and unspectacular passage of time. These surfaces offer their own visual language: one of accumulation, erosion, and the quiet dignity of decay.
Each object holds within it a fragment of narrative. Worn handles, chipped rims, faded labels – all are signs of a life once lived, of gestures repeated, of hands that once held, poured, lifted, or stored. The process of selection and placement is not driven by hierarchy or chronology, but by material resonance. A visual rhythm emerges from the cobbling together of disparate parts – things no longer needed, but not yet gone. In their newfound relationships, they speak to both impermanence and persistence.
Though modest in scale and subject, Inventory, 2023 suggests a kind of altar-making. The objects, arranged and elevated within their environment, appear mounted – offered not as precious artifacts, but as vessels of accumulated time and use. There is a sense of reverence in this presentation, not for the objects themselves, but for the stories they carry and the quiet beauty of their survival.
The work asks us to look again – to consider the aesthetic and emotional potential of what is often discarded. It draws attention to the slow transformation of place, and the way surfaces, objects, and atmospheres bear witness to the passing of days. In doing so, Inventory, 2023 becomes both a visual archive and an elegy to the everyday—a reminder that time leaves traces not just in grand gestures, but in small, worn things we may have forgotten to see.
morgan veness 