Maps can shape our perceptions, movements and experiences within a space. They can direct and inform, they can pose questions and they can mislead. Within them ideologies can be held and transmitted. In contradiction, maps can open and disperse, creating and removing myths and legacies, nonchalant to the surrounding desire for direction and fact. They show and plot journeys that have and haven’t happened. In display cases the journeys that have happened are fallacies whilst the journeys that are yet to happen are rendered illegal or hidden from view.
Maps and mapping devices, such as signs and information panels, serve to define an area. They present the information that we require according to the policies of the dominant parties. In recent times it seems that these systems are less enchanted with the environment that they are placed within, often obscuring and blocking the environment around them.
The texts, charts and maps placed within Noble Rot were designed to become part of its weaving and poetic narrative, not to sit over the top of the exhibition and the garments on display. Their design and placement sought not to direct and force pathways on to the public but to encourage free passage within the house and interaction with the threads of the exhibition.
The Noble Rot index was created, not to navigate people through the exhibition, but to locate the threads of the exhibition (tatters, inside out outside in, stain, fripperies, unfinished and relic) within the rooms of Como House. By exploding the standard Como House floor plans used by the National Trust and placing the rooms used for the exhibition on a plan where they became seperate entities, free both the house and the people moving through the house from the traditional and prescribed labels and pathways that have developed over time. This treatment partly parallels the form and structure of garment patterns, where the parts are viewed as singular pieces, to be pieced together in conjunction with the size requirements and taste of the individual. Similarly, the index allows the physical layout of the house and people’s desires within the house to construct personal pathways through the exhibition.
The positioning of some texts were left for the observant and the exploratory visitors to find, adding value for people that looked closer at the artefacts and took time to explore the house. Other texts, most notably in Freddie’s Room, offered engagement through interaction. Little ‘sermon’ books that referenced—through their form—the rituals of mourning, also offered instruction, that elsewhere in the house things could be moved.