The desire for quantity in an archive or collection suggests an inherent link between loss and accumulation. In the aftermath of loss, both personal and cultural, we gather up the objects and traces left behind, compile and examine them as though these material things can tell us something about what has happened to us. Perhaps this impulse is a way of taking inventory of our loss, measuring, through objects, the size of the void.

_Klea McKenna writes of her father’s butterfly collection.