Katie Hudnall, The Cabinet of Lost and Found Things (ART & OBJECTS 2025)

Photos:

John Carlano

Country

United States of America

The Cabinet of Lost and Found Things (2024) contains 43 drawers which hold an object or objects that I collected on daily walks over a series of years. Screws, lighters, glasses, acorns, bits of wire or jewelry, small toys - the objects suggest the lives of all the other inhabitants of my city and the ways that our movements overlap one another. The drawers are each connected to a mechanism on the wall behind them by a string running through a series of pulleys. When a drawer is opened, it pulls up a wooden flag-like section of the wall mechanism to reveal a carved wooden eye. The eyes are reminders of my moments of noticing, and calls for us all to keep noticing. As viewers open and close the drawers, the eyes wink open and closed above and around them, activating the strange map-like imagery on the wall. The legs are made from salvaged pieces of lath, that have been de-nailed, surfaced and glued into bundles to make large enough pieces. The drawers are made from reclaimed wood clapboard (mostly redwood). The cabinet and its contents, made from trash and found things, are a call to rethink how we assign value to objects and materials.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.