In true Archimedes style, my eureka moment occurred in the bath. I was listening to the BBC podcast ‘The Boring Talks’, episode 24, which was entitled ‘The Taxonomy Of Cornflakes’ and was delivered by artist Anne Griffiths. As Griffiths described the process of meticulously cataloguing what others would reasonably disregard, amid the satisfying sounds of crunching and sifting, I got very excited indeed. I totally got it.
Being an analytical and meticulous person myself, and an artist, the idea of bringing order to disorder gives me a gratifying sense of clarity, of honesty (reality even!) in a frighteningly complex and incomprehensible world. Noticing my exhilaration, I realised that ordering, sorting, cataloguing and creating rules has repeated in my art practice over the years without me really noticing.
As a participatory artist, various permutations of this practice have allowed me to let others into the process; In 2010 during a residency at Elsewhere– a former thrift store-come-museum in North Carolina, I designed ‘The Curator Creator’ a device by which visitors could categorise and curate collections of ‘sub-objects’- broken bits of plastic, dust, pieces of string, bottle tops etc.- based on how they felt about them, what memories or feelings they evoked. In this way, everyone could be a curator, bringing their own experiences and intuition into a systematic process. In 2013, I designed ‘The Drifters Guide to Urban Wandering’ a pack of cards detailing arbitrary rules by which to navigate urban spaces. I had just discovered The Situationist International, and so Psychogeography’s simple games and rules designed to penetrate ‘The Spectacle’. These have influenced my participatory work ever since.
As my bathwater grew upsettingly cold, my brain was making links between what I was hearing and my work in the public realm, my interest Stoke-on-Trent’s regeneration, my love of categorising and analysing, my belief in simple participatory processes and my huge collection of ceramic shards. A project was born right there in the suds; I would start a new collection of shards, creatively document each one’s discovery, and create a taxonomy to catalogue them. By this process, a story of modern-day Stoke-on-Trent could be developed over time and in many voices. A broken story- pieced back together by many hands.
Before I begin hunting for new shards, I decided to start designing the taxonomy using my existing collection. I soon realised that Griffiths’ neat 8-digit system could not adequately describe the shards. As I noted down each variant and ran my shards through the process, the code grew from 7 to 9 to 11 digits until I was satisfied that every possible feature of any given shard was accounted for.
In addition to these digits, there was the question of the location. Including this data in taxonomy is pretty unconventional, however, because I am making each shard a figurehead for a story of the location in which it was found, I felt it had to be included as a defining feature. Therefore, I added an extra 5-6 digits to describe the location, bringing the total code length to 16-17 digits.
Once I was happy with the taxonomical system I was like a woman possessed, scrabbling around for any shards that I had secreted around my flat- in plant pots, Tupperware boxes and pockets. The process was addictive. When my partner emerged from his studio in the evening I immediately enrolled him in a highly irregular game of Guess Who; I asked him to choose one of the codes I had written down and try to identify the corresponding shard from a pile on the dining table, using the Key I had scrawled over 6 pages of A4 paper. Amazingly, he identified the correct shard within 7 digits. I was delighted.
The process of creating each taxonomy code necessitated complete sensory engagement with the object. How did it feel? What did it look like? What materials is it made from? What are the details? This level of connection and observation is rare in modern life and was highly engrossing and meditative. The objects I had picked up were not the objects I put down- in the interim they had been fully felt, fully observed, taken to heart. Always at the back of my mind was how another person could engage with this process independently as part of a wider local, national or international project, and ideas have begun to form about how this might be possible in the future.
With a testable draft taxonomy devised, I now plan to go out and find a small collection of shards to apply it to. Then begins the next phase of the project- where I will write about the discovery of each shard and experiment with setting them into silver mounts.
