MELBOURNE STORIES | A SOCIETY OF FRIENDS with Sophia Errey

Objects possess an emotional resonance linked to our memories and sense of time and to our experience of the world around us, sensual and reflective. 

We will explore recent attempts to understand the role objects have both personally and culturally, and the significance of our collecting, and attaching meaning to, things which appear to have little aesthetic or material value, but which, as the Surrealists claimed, appear to us as “marvelous”.

SOPHIA ERREY is an artist, art educator and writer. She is particularly interested in material culture. Sophia has been a regular lecturer at The Johnston Collection since 2015 and her most recent lecture at was CLOTHED IN THE EXOTIC | India’s Influence on European Fashion (2018).

Upper bird tray from The Macquarie Collectors’ Chest c1818
Joseph Lycett (ca. 1775-1828); James Wallis (1785?-1858), William Westall (1781-1850)
The Macquarie chest (sometimes known as the Strathallan Chest), Australia, circa 1818
courtesy of the Mitchell Library, Sydney, collection of the State Library of New South Wales(SLNSW) (catalogue record 442725)
image provided | Wikimedia Commons