Death inevitably rakes up a lot from the past – all those universal feelings associated with loss and mourning, as well as forcing us to face our own mortality.
Besides the obvious issues that come up when thinking about the end of one’s life, for me, the what happens if I die question raises, in particular, issues around the amount of stuff I’ve accumulated over the years. Selfish, unfair, inconsiderate are all descriptions that come to mind – derogatory terms used to describe classic hoarders.
I resist the idea of considering myself a hoarder – apparent when I recently met with a fellow artist for the first time. As we talked through our respective work, I found myself correcting her use of the word ‘hoarder’ to ‘collector’ every time she said it. Being referred to as a hoarder clearly touches a nerve. There are all sorts of psychological issues associated with hoarding, after all – and none of them positive.
Feelings of guilt and shame are emotions frequently experienced by collectors, it seems. On my part, I’ve felt fine about collecting over the years – just accepted that I had a lot of ‘stuff’ for want of a better word. But bringing my collections together for the first time ever this summer meant confronting exactly how much I do own. The transparent boxes purchased especially for the purpose of storing it all are now crammed full of stuff; one hundred 30 litre boxes (and counting), there’s no longer any room for denial about the volume of it.
This recent revelation, plus ageing (my own) and rising storage costs have made me think differently; made me think about being more discerning about what I collect in the here and now, and about the things I want to keep from existing collections. It’s a common response, I’m sure, as are the questions I find myself thinking about: at what point does collecting turn into hoarding and how fair is it to leave behind such a mass of stuff in your wake – stuff which is so deeply personal, that it’s unlikely to mean very much at all to anyone else. What percentage of this stuff really is raw material for my art work? How far is the sheer volume of it a reflection of how hard it is for me to let go?
These are all questions that I will continue to address as the cycle of sorting, re-evaluating and making decisions about what to keep/let go of persists. For now at least, I can see more clearly what I do have and while it occasionally overwhelms me, I never seem to tire of the sorting process – from writing about it, to the actual physical sifting itself; what the sorting unearths in terms of past memories and how I respond to the feelings they evoke. Some items just make me laugh, while others can stir up a whole host of deep rooted emotions.
Small wonder then, that I have a tendency to flit from one piece of work to another, the butterfly approach I take to the work I make being as much about survival as it is about maintaining a keen interest in what’s going on around me – not getting too bogged down in the past, especially the sad parts – and maintaining a keen interest in the present; what’s here, right now, in front of me. A couple of weeks ago, I rediscovered a pair of my late Father’s pyjamas, carefully packed away – momentarily forgotten. They will be the subject of a future blog post here, I’m sure – once I’ve allowed myself time to properly digest and process the impact of finding them again, that is …
