Hold Me Together

Hold Me Together is an artwork commissioned for the Elephant Atlas project, in which seventeen artists and writers produced a work that draws inspiration from the Cuming Museum collection. In spring 2013, the London Borough of Southwark’s Cuming Museum was displaced by a fire which damaged the building in which it was housed. Since then, the collection, which includes art, sculpture, ethnography, natural history and objects reflecting the lives of ordinary residents of Southwark has been finding new ways of engaging audiences in its work.  In Hold Me Together we decided to revisit and expand on the work we created in 2012 as part of our residency at the Cuming Museum. At the time we explored ideas of home, material culture and the ways in which meaning is constructed through image, stories and conversation. Working with museum objects and objects temporarily donated by local people, Eva and Sarah curated a series of exhibitions, workshops and conversations, under the title Collecting Home, questioning how objects operate in our lives and what difference it makes when an object exists in a home or behind glass. For Elephant Atlas we considered the changed reality of Elephant and Castle: the Heygate Estate gone, and new luxury flats springing up in its place; the Cuming Museum closed; the Shopping Centre next in line for demolition. HOLD ME TOGETHER, meditates on the importance of the Cuming collection to a place undergoing dramatic gentrification and the concomitant losses that involves. It argues for the value of these eclectic objects and exhorts the viewer/reader to consider what they might offer and how they might be cared for in the future.