VOMU
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DOCspace
Welcome to the VOMU digital rooms for DOCspace and the Saturday Heritage Fair collaborating with the Doc Media Centre.
Check out the Greek Knock-off Toys room here or scroll down to find out...
What
is the Vortex Museum?
It could be anything and everything.
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Old books, VHS tapes, DVD menus, cassettes, branding, advertising in comics, odd ephemera, weird vinyl, nuggets of cinema, crossovers, magazines, gaming...​​
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VOMU was born out of conversations about worth and discovery; about exploration, concepts of canonisation and the utter joy of holding something in your hand. Inspirations came from watching happy toy hunts online, visiting the Museum of Brands and an exposure to the ideas of digital archaeology in modern times from a 2014 exhibition urging me to re-evaluate how I saw what was around me. It is of hauntology and all the sensations that ignite I can't articulate when I feel like an urban Indiana Jones stumbling across a basket of video tapes in a quiet charity shop.
How might my museum look and feel I thought? Can the emotion and wonder I'm experiencing be transferred when I find something I've never seen or have a re-discovery from childhood off of a dusty bookshelf I haven't touched for decades? Will others relate to this and be intrigued? Can I do that? I wanted to.
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This combination of project realisation and personal conquest lead me to the Saturday Heritage Fair​​​ in late 2023.
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I needed a place that I could engage with people directly and open the concept up raw and unrefined for interpretation. This would help me mould it as I progressed and consider: what might others see in this? It would be sometimes nothing and sometimes a lot. I set it up as a nameless pop-up table asking visitors to write a name for it on small brown labels and tell me what it was they were looking at. What I found was smiles and talks with people of all ages, opening up and excited to rummage through what I had curated.​​
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Can it be personal and introspective as well as vast and exploratory? A place for indulgence and nostalgia, for looking and learning, admiring grand aesthetics and acknowledging small details. A destination you find new things to love.
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One man's trash is another man's
treasure
Now I scour second-hand and charity shops all over London, towns across the country and train trips to the national snow drifts of the UK that are our seaside towns, every chance I get. I live for the discoveries I make and the searching for things. There is nothing like the feeling of revealing an item you never knew existed until the very moment you see it or find an item you've been actively searching for.
So many times walking home my bag is full of books, CDs, films and oddities that have travelled through time to reach me. I cannot wait to sit on the sofa under a blanket with a cup of tea and shuffle through what I rescued for the museum.
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Exhibition and virtual spaces
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A new form for the still developing museum was presented at the 2025 edition of the DocPhoto8​​ exhibition in Leicester.
Over the short period I'd been building the museum there'd been plenty of times I'd found something I wanted in there and couldn't think how it could be captured or encapsulated. Whilst some are physically impossible to salvage or bring home, others are intangible findings, happenings and objects in places. I came to the realisation that my museum would not only be made up of physical pieces I care for and collect but that I'd document findings on location found intentionally or through happenstance. From total surprises abroad to personal ones at my family home. I began to create the initial four of these which were in the UK, Denmark and Greece portrayed in a magazine style and an invitation to others, again, to consider what a museum can be. For me it further pushed how my museum can document, expand and grow its ideas into reality.
New room
coming next
week for DOCspace
