The works in this exhibition began with an idea that became something else as a result of time spent opening the drawers of the McCord Museum’s archive to examine many and varied hand-stitched, woven and worn objects, and deciphering hand-written histories: notes, letters and ledgers. The works were developed through thinking about the connections between objects and their makers, objects and their collectors, and how the objects transition between the archive and the living world.The resulting artworks explore different ways of recording experience through sensory engagement to highlight relationships past, present and future.

Hannah Claus is a multidisciplinary visual artist of Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) and English ancestry. She uses installations to create sensory environments that speak of memory and transformation.

This exhibition is presented as part of the McCord Museum’s Artist-in-Residence program, which invites artists from Montreal and elsewhere to explore and interact with the Museum’s collections, casting a critical and conceptual eye and relating them to their own artistic practices. Through the works they create, artists in residence revisit the social and historical facets of artefacts in the Museum’s collections and address how they help construct our identity as Montrealers and as a society.