Queen Victoria and later Freud asked their staff to make an inventory of their belongings; Freud had his maid reposition his objects exactly on his arrival from Vienna, to Hampstead. Queen Victoria had her objects photographed from every angle, and these photographs were put into albums for her to look at. She would no doubt be pleased to know that on the carpet at Osborne House, a plaque marks the place where she fell to her death. Originally I started out with the thought that I would make a visual inventory of the objects of the garden individually on a white background, suggesting the diagrams of the pacific voyage of Captain Cook that Nicholas Thomas has evaluated recently in the book: The Culture of collecting. This method will no doubt change as I hear more of the stories associated with the objects.
Susan Stewart writes on this signifying use of fragment for whole:
The set of objects a museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a representational universe.”
