David Kemp: Botallack Hoard

What does an old rocking horse, a garden fork and a dustbin lid have in common?  They are all items of junk that make up “Sun Chariot”, a sculpture featuring in a new exhibition at the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro.

 

“Botallack Hoard” by David Kemp is an intriguing showcase that will transport visitors into the future examining relics, artefacts and god-dollies from consumer cults that thrived on the South West Peninsula at the end of the second millennium.

 

David Kemp, artist and curator of the exhibition explains: “I am a future archaeologist working for the “Department of Reconstruction,” invited by the Museum to display items unearthed from a variety of Late Iron Age sites of human occupation”.

 

He continues: “A puzzling diversity of artefacts will be exhibited offering glimpses of a resourceful people who developed a technology that reflected their dreams.  The functions of these objects remains open to speculation. Re-assembling this jigsaw of fragments from the past has been largely guesswork, informed by the myths & legends from that fabulous age. Lacking any documentary evidence, few clues survive that shed any light on the fate of this advanced culture.”

 

David lives and works on the far western coast of Cornwall, among the old mine workings near Botallack.  He has been collecting Cornish junk for over 30 years prompted by the 1970’s working landscape which was a much scruffier place.

 

“Farmers rarely threw anything away completely just in case it came in useful.”  Every farm had its dump tucked away for the Cornish farmers’ art of make and mend which was called “Codging.”  There were abandoned cars on moor top sites, lay-bys littered with debris, ruined mines lay derelict and beaches carried a daily tide of plastic and pollution.”

 

Since then, the landscape has noticeably changed for the good, but David recognises that where there are people, there is junk.

 

“I’d like to highlight our wasteful society through the junk I have collected for this exhibition but I also want it to be fun and entertaining.  I hope that children of all ages, from 6 – 86 years old, will enjoy it but I also hope that I make people think about the wasteful nature of our lifestyles now so they are more aware in the future.”

 

David Kemp: Botallack Hoard opens on 10 April and is on show until 3 July.