Lost Magic Kingdoms Paolozzi

During a residency in Scotland, Mariana Castillo Deball immersed herself in the personal archive of late Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005), and was captivated in particular by documentation of the Pop art pioneer’s 1985 exhibition Lost Magic Kingdoms and Six Paper Moons from Nahuatl. In this display, Paolozzi presented “leftover” artifacts from the British Museum’s ethnographic collection, among them papier-mâché molds made by nineteenth-century archaeologist Alfred Maudslay at locations including Palenque, the site of a Mayan city-state in southern Mexico. Struck by these “ghost objects,” the artist has made what might be thought of as artificial fossils that embody both Maudslay’s casts and their influence on Paolozzi’s sculpture.