welcome to the museum of a life

On entering this Museum of a Life, feel free to wander at will. However, don’t miss a single gallery, as every exhibit invokes a small part of the life of Sue Finch. By the time you leave the museum for the Gift Shop to buy a blue apple for a loved one, you will know her well.

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’Sue Finch’s voice is both steady and questioning as she sets down the archive of her life museum and invites you to lean in for a closer look. Each exhibit feels like a very personal and off-kilter chronicle of a collective memory where wolves and silence stand with their backs to the corners of the theatrical space of a museum cabinet in which Smurfs and giraffes have walk-on parts. And it’s well worth imagining the gift shop - that unsettling pelican’s disco moves stencilled on a tea towel; a postcard steeped in the metal taste of the narrator’s own blood.’ - Helen Ivory.

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’Ponds, pitfalls, pandemics, peacocks, pelicans and funeral preparations. On view in Sue Finch’s second collection is a kaleidoscope of memory, moments, fears and desires, curated in a lyrical museum with spotlights on circus tents, taxidermy tables, distant dreams and swirling nightmares. The recollections are residues on the tip of the tongue, the names of each already faded, fallen or pulled like the pelt from the flesh with only a metallic tang left in its wake and the future is a disco very deep in the woods with tunes yet to be identified. This is a Daliesque ramble through the gardens of life, an asymmetrical, syncopated joyride. Welcome to the Museum of a Life is triumphant with its directions, distractions and dancing Deathwatch Beetles. Buy a ticket in advance to spare yourself the disappointment of this museum being sold out!’ - Damien B Donnelly.

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’At once mindful and surreal, these poems take us on a journey through the Museum of a Life, passing from childhood, through vivid everyday events, to love and dreams, and to considerations of mortality. The intriguing exhibits include the small but profound miracle of a tortoise waking from hibernation, the revelation of night skies in the armpits of a lover, a poet rescuing a giraffe after an earthquake, a dancing pelican and other such wonders. Like all the best museums, this one does not have too many rules, and we can walk amongst and interact with the poems at will. Sue Finch welcomes us into a world of multisensory surround sound. Unsentimental yet tender, this collection is an original and imaginative celebration of the temporary treasures of life, and of the human condition.’ - Ivor Daniel.