What We Caught We Threw Away, What We Didn't Catch We Kept By Mariana Castillo Deball

Mariana Castillo Deball (Mexico City, 1975) is interested in the biography of objects, centering her practice on sculptural form and social space. Concerned with the process of exchange and adopting methodologies from other disciplines, she develops ‘an intermediate game, between science, storytelling, fiction and visual arts’, without losing humour in the process.

The exhibition presents the results of an intense period of research conducted at the British Museum in London and during research residencies at Cove Park. Departing from historical and archaeological Mayan writing and objects, the exhibition guides us through the work of explorer and archaeologist Alfred Maudsley, Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi and anthropologist Alfred Gell who all developed ideas and techniques of analysing diverse cultural objects.

Deball investigates their efforts by offering a new body of work examining modes of objectification within visual cultures and the relationships it produces to ‘agency’, so often attached to various disciplines of artistic, ethnographic and historical nature.