How to use our collection
Last updated: 30 Oct 2022
Searching through our collection, our website will recognise a variety of inputs as you access our materials. The Marian Clayden Foundation holds many materials on its own, but Marian’s legacy also extends to museum holdings and physical objects held externally to the Foundation.
These materials will also be catalogued here to further our goal of creating a central repository for Marian’s works, but we will indicate that it is an external holding and link to the external website if one exists.
Accession Numbers
Accession numbers are traditionally used by museums and archives to give quick information that both uniquely identifies an item and helps archivists and conservators locate the object in their storage. We have developed our own schema to assist you in searching our collections for relevant materials. Each portion of the schema is broken down below to help you understand how to conduct efficient searches and decode the data presented.
Year
The primary identifier of a piece is the year of the work depicted. In the case of photographs and slides of events or exhibitions, the year the photo was taken will be given instead.
If a year is uncertain, a decade will be given (e.g. 197X for an item most likely dated to the 1970s).
Category
Marian’s artwork is divided into four distinct categories:
D - Dyed art: irrespective of method, works whose primary artistic component is the dyeing process. This includes large dyed textiles from Marian’s early career and the art created from them.
F - Fibre art: Marian’s dyed textile art is created and shown almost always as whole cloth. Fibre art includes dyed cloth or other media where the art piece has significant manipulation to it beyond simply dyeing.
A - Artwear* (also known as wearable art, or art to wear): unique pieces of art created for the human form by Marian. Often not commercialised, but limited edition art pieces intended to be worn on the body.
G - Garment: Marian’s commercially sold garments, accessories, and couture.
Each unique design or artwork will be given an identifying number in sequence of their cataloguing. All collection references to that same work will bear the unique reference. E.g. The Florentine dress would be designated A1, and the next piece of artwear A2, etc.
Joyful Noise, 1971
Dyed art
Untitled Silks, 1970s
Fibre art
Float dress, 2004
Artwear
Tassel top, Triangle skirt, June ‘02 Collection
Garment
Item number
If a particular piece is depicted or referenced by another item (e.g. a 35mm photographic slide of a particular artwork, or a foam poster print of a photo), we will append a unique reference to identify the piece as distinct from the artwork it depicts. At present we have the following categories:
N - Film negative
S - Slide
SB - Slide box
Digitisation
Where an image has been scanned, we will append a D to the end of the item number reference to distinguish the image from the physical object. E.g. Reference S14 refers to the physical slide, while S14D refers to the image on the slide.
Location
The final element to the accession number is the location identifier. Where an item is held by the Foundation, it will be labelled with its storage location for ease of reference. E.g. a slide contained in a slide box catalogues as SB1 will be shown as …S1.SB1.
External Holdings
Where an item is held by an external institution like the Victoria & Albert museum, we will catalogue it with our own schema and append an external relationship identifier to the accession number (e.g. E4). These relationship identifiers will be kept up to date in a table here for your use as new connections are added.
Examples
*The Foundation must acknowledge that all of Marian’s widely produced and commercially sold garments are no less artwear than her limited-run pieces, but to make a distinction between pieces with a specific artistic intention separate from her business, we have created two categories.
