It's Never Just a Book

It started with an object—and a question

This digital exhibit extends For Us, It’s Never Just an Object, a Made By: Kawartha Lakes exhibition first presented at the Lindsay Exhibition in 2026.

At the fair, five objects opened five very different stories about the people who have made—and continue to make—Kawartha Lakes. Each painted panel offered only a few possible paths: names, places, skills, movements and ideas connected to the object on display. Visitors could stop there, or scan a QR code and follow the story further.

The Adelaide Hoodless panel began with a book:
Cheryl MacDonald’s Adelaide Hoodless: Domestic Crusader.

A biography may look like a straightforward object. Open it, however, and it becomes a gathering place for many other things—family loss, public speaking, school policy, food safety, women’s organizations, household labour, political disagreement and changing ideas about education.

The book also led us back to Hoodless’s own writing. Her 1898 textbook, Public School Domestic Science, tells us what she believed girls should learn and why. A Lindsay newspaper tells us what happened when she brought those ideas here in 1901. Later reports from Oakwood, Bethany, Lindsay and Fenelon Falls show that the questions did not disappear when her visit ended.

This digital exhibit follows those connections beyond what one fair panel could hold.

FOR US, IT’S NEVER JUST AN OBJECT

An object is evidence. It carries the marks of the people who imagined it, made it, used it, valued it and chose to preserve it. When we ask the right questions, one object can open an entire network of lives and ideas.

This is also a working history. Sources disagree. Familiar stories sometimes turn out to be less certain than we thought. An achievement can be real without being uncomplicated. We point out those tensions as we go, because asking better questions is part of the work.

Begin with the book. See where it takes us.