New House, Old Stuff
Yes, that stuff. The same old stuff that I’ve been carrying about for as long as I can remember and will never part with it. The stuff that can feel like a chain around my neck that probably should have gone to the auction house or charity shop years ago. The stuff that makes me feel me. The stuff that I love.
All this stuff I have collected.
Having a collection is all about arranging and rearranging our universe. It helps to take control of a new house and I can start telling our story and keep writing it. I collect things because they mean something or because they tickle my curiosity. They remind of what I would like to be (feather cape and gold dance shoes) or have been (feather cape and gold dance shoes). I look back at a life time of gathering and I know some are beyond other people’s comprehension (lion poo)but on that line between collection and hoarding our objects take super natural powers. Famously André Breton never parted with his last Picasso collage, even though it would have saved him from the harsh poverty he had fallen into in his last days, saying “I would feel poor without it”. I like collections of an eclectic nature; those we start to form almost without noticing. They can be subtle collections and to the unaware eye might just look like bits and bobs or clutter, but to the collector they make their world real and ground them. The “collector’s” life gives the objects a context and vice versa.
I always come across clients little collections and I love them!While designing a living space for my client’s eclectic collection, I’m not interested in creating a museum display, where objects are completely out of reach, but in integrating the vast and varied array of collections into daily life.
I’m fascinated by the first cabinets of curiosities, where boundaries of classification – even the conventional categories of art and science – were blurred.
From this comes the idea of the ever-evolving space that is my living room ( or it is going to be) one that can contain the chaos that arises from having such a diverse array of objects. I love the idea that in the first cabinets of curiosities, collectors would display their treasures with a completely different notion of classification from a contemporary one, as with Sir John Soane and his incredible home, where classification was done by an aesthetic and intuitive sense rather a scientific one. Even the idea of treasure was different, since just a few miles away could mean a new world, and objects we can now buy in tourist souvenir shops would have been sought after rarities, so I can totally justify the endless amount of shells from 2 miles down the road. I guess in my “collection” the objects are not rare and unique pieces of incredible value but the result of a lifetime’s habit of rescuing the absurd and silly If we give any object its rightful place, and if it’s displayed with the right gravitas, then any object can become a “museum piece” in our very private museums. Enjoy the hunt.