Articles of Interest

Last year I met a student studying Archaeology called Alice. I started to talk about my work, my preoccupation with supporting recognition for unidentified deceased human lives and how my project was focused on exploring secondary identifiers; more recently through conceptual methods such as with the Trace Fossils using readily available objects to experiment with.

We talked about historical objects including the use of drawing versus photography to record items, and through our conversation it transpired that drawing is still considered an accurate method of capturing and recording information on archaeological digs. Alice kindly recommended the Archaeological Illustration (Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology) by Lesley Adkins and Roy Adkins which provides a guide to archaeological illustration.

Photograph: of p160 of the Archaeological Illustration (Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology)

I found this fascinating. Before our conversation I would have assumed that other methods such as photography would have been deemed more accurate but from our brief talk it seems that due to the finite and complex nature of details around archaeological sites, drawings provide a perspective that the camera cannot capture.

As an artist operating in the current climate of AI advancement it was also a joy to hear how drawing skills are still deemed so valuable in this sense.

Trace Fossil made of clay, imprinted with Rosary beads - next to a drawing study of the same. ©S Leader, 2026

Inspired by this new intel, I went back to the Trace Fossils I had started to create in clay. I approached them with a new lens, as if I had come across them for the first time and started to consider what my impression of them would be.

Starting with the very first piece I made, I drew it's form onto paper and started to annotate it. Something different happened here. I started to think about the material and information it held differently. As if dissecting it. It wasn't just about the story of the impression left any more but the story of the whole piece.

Where did the object come from? What was it made from? What were the dimensions? The clay object itself has a history. This is where some of the translation work started to take form but additionally I started to adopt this mindset with the possessions I was exploring with the Articles of Interest. What is the history of an object? How was it manufactured? What material is it?

This questioning starts to draw on the historical context of the item and once those questions are answered it perhaps gives and indication to the era it came to be and its distribution, its popularity, its durability, its rareness and perhaps even the type of person that would own it?

Considering the make up of an object is layered (not just multiple items on a person) I have started to play with the idea of dismantling an item through an interrogative approach where drawing and labelling start to take on a more forensic and archival methodology.

Photo of 'Article of Interest' - drawn study using transparencies, rice paper and tape. ©S Leader, 2026

Further to conceptualising and curating The Inquiry Room and linking to my earlier blog Traces of a Life I have continued to contemplate the stories that our personal effects might carry abut us and how they might be shown but alongside this I am interested in exploring the context of the object and it's nostalgic implications.

There is a dual narrative in these approaches and when considering where they should be placed, they could oscillate between an art and a museum context.