The Grafton Annex — The 8 Museum

established january 2025, on the river

coordinates 29°41′S, 152°56′E

collection 49 works accessioned; a selection of eight exhibited below

holdings on permanent loan from the built environment of Grafton; not one has been moved

premises Grafton and South Grafton, on either bank of the Clarence

hours continuous; jacaranda season is recommended but not required

admission attention

An annex of The 8 Museum is a city in which encounters have occurred. Unlike the annexes of other institutions, it holds no building, employs no staff, and has acquired nothing. Its collection is held on indefinite loan from the world and remains installed where it was found — on weatherboard, a pool ball held up beside a beer, corrugated iron, and the red of a country pub — maintained, without their knowledge, by the residents, the weather, and the municipal services of the city itself.

The Grafton Annex was established in January 2025 and completed over eight days spread across half a year, which the committee considers the correct pace for the Clarence. Forty-nine works were accessioned, twenty-five of them on a single January afternoon. It is the museum's only Australian annex not on the coast, and the committee records the eight-ball held up, reluctantly, by a friend in front of her schooner as the only work in the collection to have been accessioned while somebody was drinking beside it — a work the committee was later obliged to sit on. Each of the annex's works was photographed in situ, untouched, under existing conditions, and left exactly as it was. Visitors to Grafton are advised that the collection remains on public display. Every work was last verified on the day of its encounter; what the weather, the council, and the ordinary attrition of the world have since done to them, the museum does not undertake to know. The register records the encounter, not the object; an encounter, once entered, is beyond the reach of the weather.