As if she hadn’t had enough to do, combining two rather large found objects— Hitchcock’s Psycho house and a 19th-century barn—on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Cornelia Parker has also been busy organising a brilliant exhibition called Found (until 4 September) at the Foundling Museum in London. Many of the 69 participating artists and cultural luminaries were out in force at last night’s opening (26 May), where it quickly became evident that the show was as much about stories as objects, with each exhibit freighted with a wealth of tales surrounding its origins and/or its discovery.
Richard Wentworth’s addition included a chance glimpse of his very grand granny caught on the BBC, being vox-popped at a National Gallery’s Edward Ardizzone exhibition. Rose Wylie has used the cardboard box, which originally contained her rescue cat, to paint a portrait of the cat itself, while Ron Arad declared that his chain of pawnbroker’s tickets—ending in 1951, the year of his birth, and many of which heartbreakingly bear the letters GWR (gold wedding ring)—was one of his most treasured possessions. Jarvis Cocker found lurid images of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania in a dustbin bag in Bristol, Jeremy Deller bought John Lennon’s school detention sheet at an auction last year, while Marina Warner came across the tooth of a sperm whale mysteriously nestling amongst her late mother’s possessions.
Other gems range from Humphrey Ocean’s gleaming chrome hubcap, displayed amongst the museum’s silverware, to Yinka Shonibare’s boy trumpeter, made in homage to William Hogarth, one of the Foundling’s first artist-benefactors. Extra conviviality was added to the evening courtesy of copious glasses of Rockett’s Milk Punch, a bespoke gin cocktail provided by 58 Gin distillery and specially concocted by the London Gin Club around a recipe from the 18th-century English housewife Mary Rockett. He may have given us the decidedly unfavourable image of Gin Lane (1751), but Mr Hogarth was also partial to a spot of gin punch and the general consensus was that he would have thoroughly approved of the evening’s libations, which were liberally consumed in increasingly garrulous homage to the act of retrieval.