The collection of things.

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Sea glass, beautiful rocks, INNER GEOLOGIST - Collecting is also about categorising,

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During my brain surgery recovery (Dec 2020-Feb 2022) I would speak to my therapist, and as an entry point into our discussions, she would ask me "Are you making anything at the moment?" and I was really struggling with the idea of not making anything, even though I technically was making - I was creating little 'wild clay' - locally found, dug, and processed clay - shrink test rulers, and systematically firing them to different temperatures, to measure and record and catalogue the shrinkage percentages, the colour changes and chemical reactions imposed by the intense kiln temperatures of up to 1300*C. At the time, I felt insecure and confused about what the rulers were, because they weren't artworks to me at the time. They were to be part of an ongoing collection, and I took a sense of pleasure in making them, and then adding them to my collection. I was then posed another question: "Does it Have to be an 'artwork'? Why can't it just be a collection?" A concept that had never really crossed my mind before. This was a really good point, because this kind of collecting is widely seen by artists, as artists are drawn to certain objects. It’s not that I was necessarily making art objects, I have been making a collection, and THAT is the important thing, that it can be categorised as an artefact, or art object. That you composite the question to myself, "Am I a Taxonomer?", as I've been exploring the notion of memory degradation, I have formulated a list of my memories in the respective book collections. An argument could be made that this is a method of taxonomy; by organising, and finding categories, as that is what people put their collections into, a taxonomy. In talking about objects, as well as the machine, the objects became less important, but I'm interested in this idea of the objects, which is still a type of taxonomy.

 

(Colour pencils analogy) ---

Gerald Mernain? -- he has a collection from when he was a child, a collection of 72 coloured pencils.  He says " I could never draw, but I used to take them out and look at the name written on the side of the pencil, in the end, all I needed was to remember the name of the colour, written in black and white, and I would remember the colour"

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 It was the way they were classified, collected and presented that gave him that great pleasure. It wasn’t that drawing anything with them, the picture was not important to him. But he could picture the colour, by thinking of the name, and this demonstrates another taxonomic system. Taking the pressure off the art object. Looking at things outside of the Fine Art context is important as well, it's about our engagement with the world, and how the world might not be excluded from the rarefied air of the fine art world. Which is something I have embraced in this work, by grounding my research in play, my childhood, the narrative, exploring what a taxonomy is, and the relational rearrangement of my objects by other people, focusing on these relationships. My sense of agency in the world, me as an 'actor'.