University of Hertfordshire

Written to accompany the inaugural exhibition of the St Albans Museum and Gallery which showcased three artists' responses to the Museum's collection, this text introduces the work of Lyndall Phelps, Katy Gillam-Hull and Abi Spendlove. It also raises questions about museums' assumptions about collections and preservation and the process of taphonomy, or the process of both preservation and decay inherent over time. Critical of the hubris surrounding the encyclopaedic aims of collecting, the essay posits artistic interventions as the counterweight to such grandiose hubris.