Whilst in one of the charity shops I set my eyes upon baskets full of decorated teaspoons from various towns and countries. There was something quite unique about them which intrigued me so I decided I would buy several. This then gave me my own collection of spoons. I am now beginning to feel like a true collector, seeing as the day after I purchased my first lot of spoons, I went back the next day to increase my collection! I had a sudden urge that I needed them all!
At first I was excited to start using them in my work and was thinking about various ways to use them. However, as much as I liked the idea of them I didn’t feel like I connected with them in through my work. They were literally just spoons I had bought and called a collection. They had no personal meaning to me. Which is when I realised I was interested in the collection having a meaning to me. I think it needs to have a connection with me, for me to really work with them the best I can.
OCD is an element within collecting which I have been interested in through researching in my dissertation and keen to explore further. Often with avid collectors they are very specific with how their belongings are ordered and displayed. These end up being religious traits they follow everyday of their lives. For example a family friend Hazel who focused in my work last year. She would have her collections all specifically organised by animal and object. For example all of the pandas together, all of the clocks together and so on. she did this to distinguish between them all. i believe this is due to a natural reaction to order and the more she collected, the harder it got for her to separate them. She gained emotional attachment to them due to living in the house with them 24/7.
I wanted to look at this OCD element within my work to see how I could explore it. Therefore I took a trip into town and in every charity shop I entered I would buy a pair of silver shoes. I then ended up with a collection of silver shoes which had been bought through this rule. Does this therefore make it a collection? As i obeyed the rule I set and this was my intended outcome? Or is this too small to be classed as a collection and there needs to be more meaning behind the collection rather than just an accumulation of silver shoes?
I decided to hang these from my space as it is not the normal way to display shoes in your house or in shops. Display is an element which really fascinates me within collecting. Will the viewer take more notice as the shoes are suspended somewhere abnormal for them to be rather than on the floor like you would perhaps expect?
I have been collecting my used make up wipes for months as it is a simple yet effective way I feel of portraying myself without actually creating a self portrait the traditional way that is thought.
It is a daily routine I go through of putting my make up on in the morning and then removing it in the evening. Each wipe represents a day where I have had that ‘face’ on. It kind of shows a mask of who I become once I put it on until I remove it. It is like hiding behind material, giving confidence, once that is wiped off the remains of that is left on the wipe meaning all confidence is lost? Each individual wipe tells a story of that day, but no-one can tell from the wipe what happened, it leaves the viewer to think about the story behind that wipe.
There is an abject feel to these wipes. Although they do not bother me obviously, because they have the remains of what was on my face of each day. However talking to others, it surprised me how many people actually appear to be quite disgusted in the fact that they are used wipes. This really interests me as to why they become so disgusting. There are pieces of work I have been interested in from artists whose work has disgusted and shocked me, but at the same time intrigued me as to why it has been done. Franco B’s piece ‘I Miss you!’ and Tracey Emins’s ‘The History of Painting’ are two pieces that really give that abject feeling to me and while my work is nowhere near as shocking as these it really fascinates me how people react to work … Is it the thought of the wipes being wiped over skin and eyes? Is it just the appearance of left over make up that stains these wipes? Or just how they look with the various coloured markings? Or is it the vast amount that I have collected, that they appear to just overtake the space?
This is something that has really fascinated me by how something as innocent as a used make up wipe can provoke so much response and is something I am keen to push forward to see how people react when it is more abject.
Following my interest in Dieter Roth’s work, I began to explore my own way of collecting waste material. I have began to collect every receipt I receive. This will portray me through this paper manner. It will be personal by displaying to the viewer items I have purchased. In a way this is showing me, but in a different form. Similar to that of a self-portrait through an auto-biographical collection.
This sort of personal collecting has really fascinated from looking at Dieter Roth. How the artist can portray themselves through a collection and by pushing the levels of shock and disgust through this can really provoke reaction and response. I initially displayed them all lined up on my wall in chronological order to show system and order. However different ways of display perhaps would affect how the viewer reads this. For example what would happen if the receipts were to be grouped into amounts of money spent, or times of the day, or particular shops? Would anything change?
Dieter Roth is an artist who I have conducted a lot of research on as of late due to his way of display within collecting. I find his work very interesting by how personal his collections are to him.
This piece called Flat Waste was an installation piece where Roth collected every piece of waste material he collected each day under 5mm thick, over the course of a year. This resulted in a vast archive of material showing his personal life for that year in waste matter.
He chose to display all of these folders in archives on shelves, meaning that most of his collection were hidden away. However he only chose a select few to be on display with lamps. Drawing the viewers attention to these ones and attracting less focus on the shelved ones. This provokes curiosity once thought about as to why only some folders are on show, while others are hid from view. There could even be frustration from the viewer as to why they are not on display, meaning the true extent of disgust of this waste is not shown. This really interests me as to why he has chosen to display in this manner and how the manipulation of the collection can alter the viewers interpretation. This is something I would like to explore later on. Does the viewer believe there really is all this waste archived away? This then relies on trust from the viewer in the artist.
