An installation consisting of 5 large wooden shipping crates, each containing hundreds of found objects assembled in specific configurations by the artists. Each is filled with goods collected by the artists from auctions, abandoned storage units, internet sites, junk shops and street finds. The work is a reflection of the history, systems and culture which enable the movement of goods outside the mainstream; from barrels and blind auctions to shipping crates and the recycle economy. The installation suggests the inadvertent ways in which these assembled items create narratives around themselves and the lives they inhabit.

The installation is titled ‘Today’s gift is tomorrow’s commodity. Yesterday’s commodity is tomorrow’s found art object. Today’s art object is tomorrow’s junk. And yesterday’s junk is tomorrow’s heirloom.’ This draws on a quote from the sociologist Arjun Appadurai, whose work on ‘’object biography’ and the social life of things’ deeply informs debates on globalisation and material culture. Lloyd Corporation’s installation and research process reflected on the social life of discarded, lost, found, recycled and recirculated objects, as a way to critically consider how value shifts across modes of production, possession, dispossession and obsolescence. Through this exploration of object biography, of collections and material accumulation, the artists create a network of connections between the items themselves and the activities and circumstances that link them together; of both global capitalism and informal local economies.

Describing the genesis of their research for the installation Lloyd Corporation said:

"We were in a small flea market shop on The Lanes in Brighton, one of the only ones open on a non-market day, during the early phase of Covid lockdown easing … we’ve always been drawn to these kinds of places. Where piles of stuff cascade onto one another, a clumsy and ambivalent materiality that doesn’t call out to be seen. Messy and informal with an unruliness to its staging that at least appears to evade composition and discipline. What Jane Bennet calls ’vibrant matter’. One never knows how long these things have actually been there for, placing them somewhere between alive and obsolete, trash or treasure, transient but enduring, trade and collection, commodities or gifts; and back again."

This installation was created following a sustained period of research by Lloyd Corporation over 18 months, and formed part of a major new commission at Brighton CCA. The installation formed an ambitious sculptural work that builds upon a longer term practice of collecting lost and found objects and engagement with contemporary markets of recycle and exchange such as eBay.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/39384