ABSTRACT
Thinking about materiality in its broadest sense, this chapter examines an idiosyncratic finding aid for the archives of the Slade School of Fine Art, London. A Slade School of Fine Art Archive Reader (1998) is a four-volume, hand-bound index and unpublished manuscript written by Slade alumnus, art historian and former archivist, Stephen Chaplin (b. 1934). Close analysis of this document demonstrates how thinking materially can enrich and enliven an understanding of the multiple ways in which archives and archival practices can be figured and storied. I propose that by homing in on the material encounters provoked by this finding aid, we can perceive the contingencies, subjectivities, places of ambivalence and points of translation and transformation interwoven through the histories of archival collections as they manifest along a variety of sensory planes and perceptual fields. Part biography of an archival project, collection and its archivist, and part ethnographic arrival story, this chapter addresses these material connections in order to illuminate the layered and multi-sensory vantage points through which archives and archival finding aids evolve and operate.
