When is a thing just a thing?

The Ford Sunliner Convertible 1/50 scale model began its life as an idea in the mind of a Tootsietoy employee. The idea is outlined in a meeting with the design team, and the lads down in the workshop are given a brief to convert it into zinc and rubber reality. It is broken down into component elements, and how they fit together, and the technical draughtsmen turn the rough sketches into beautifully executed lines and angles, to create the moulds that will in turn create the die-cast car. The engineers create the tools and set the machinery in motion.

The car emerges triumphant.

The shopkeeper sees the model car in a retailers catalogue, and orders a consignment. It is a brash, American design that will appeal to his customers, coming out of the post-war gloom and looking for a bit of colour and excitement. The same mood that Summer Holiday would capture later that year.

The mother sees the car in the window of a toyshop, and is taken by its shiny red seats and bright white paint. It reminds her of movie stars and Hollywood glamour, and so she buys it for her young son as a surprise present.

The little boy receives his new toy as is no more than his due. He takes it on adventures around his room, bangs it against the floor in a moment of frustration, drives it across the bedspread, drops it on the stairs, finds it later, miraculously returned to his toy box and sucks on it absently while thinking of many other things.

The boy becomes ill, and is taken to hospital. The car remains at home, unnoticed and unloved.

In the hospital, medical staff become concerned after tests show the child has abnormally high levels of lead in his blood. Where might it have come from? They begin to ask the family questions about where they live, their house, what sort of objects are in it. A team visits the home and removes a bag of items for testing.

In the laboratory, the car becomes a suspect, and its jaunty red seats a terrible mistake. Case notes are completed, the child is treated, and the car is confiscated and put into the hospital’s teaching collection. It is mounted and encased, transformed from an emblem of freedom and exploration into a stark warning of the dangers of modern materials. It becomes ‘S.4’ and its record sheet is filed alongside the anonymous S.3 and S.5.

It stays in the dark, pulled out occasionally to show medical students, but seeing the classroom less and less over time as staff learn to lean on electronic teaching aids and forget the physical witnesses of illness and diagnosis.

Then one day it becomes special again, and is chosen as the focus of a curious installation, in which this most subjective of objects is opened up to the public imagination and put at the centre of a network of new adventuring.

A conceit, a technical challenge, a commodity, an emblem of love for a child, a companion and comfort, a danger, an investigation, a culprit, a warning, a curiosity and an inspiration.

Is a thing ever just a thing?