Things I have collected

I have been thinking about what Sarah Cheang says in her essay about the collection providing a material encoding of the collectors desired identity. Displaying a collection is a way of communicating your personal preferences, an instant way of representing yourself. You can portray anything you want through your collection.


Things I collected as a child:

• Stamps - kept in albums, my Uncle Graham would send 1st day covers, some of the stamps were old, my prized stamp was a Penny Red.


• Postcards - kept in a photo album. I would buy at least one everywhere I visited.


• Rubbers (erasers) - kept in an ice cream tub, brought out, counted, arranged, re-arranged, sniffed, put back in box.
  

Things collected as a teenager:

• Parrots - earrings, brooches, ornaments, pictures etc. displayed in my bedroom, gifts mainly and all new.


• Vintage Handbags - started buying them when I was about 15 and I started to buy my clothes in secondhand shops. Kept in a box.

Things I collect now:

• Coffee pots - dispalyed in kitchen, all brought at jumble sales or secondhand shops. All practical and I have used them.


• Jugs - as above.


• Necklaces - all worn, vintage and cheap plastic, kept in jewelery boxes and dishes in bed room.


• Vintage haberhashery - most brought, some gifts, some displayed, most in tins and boxes, brought out, counted, arranged, re-arranged, sniffed and put back in boxes.
  

So what's to made of that? The collections as a child were kept private, probably not my choice, I'm sure my mum made me put them away, but they were taken out and viewed, worked on/added to and then put away.

As a teen the parrots were displayed, more of a way of rebelling, they were bright and bold in a house of beige and brown, my room was very 80's, pink and grey. I then started collecting and coverting vintage practical things again as a rebellion to the new plastic that was all around. I had also started working as a Stage Manger having to buy and find props, so I was becoming more aware of these items. All the things I started to buy would be used, they had to be practical again the opposite of my mum's ornaments that would sit on the side, even practical things she brought couldn't be used straight away, they had to be washed up, put back in the box and put in the cupboard.

The vintage haberdashery is a fairly new collection but I feel it's a mission to save it from being thrown away or unappreciated. I think that's the thing that distresses me most, the idea that things can be dismissed as rubbish and thrown out, this idea makes my blood run cold.

A collection of collections

I have been reading a selection of essays called Collectors, Expressions of Self and Others, edited byAnthony Shelton who is the Head of Collections at the Horniman Museum.

In Sarah Cheangs essay 'The Dogs of Fo: Gender, Identity and Collecting' she say's at 'the Collection is the self, created by the will of the collector in response to both conscious and subconscious desires.

It represents the desired self: an ideal self. Whatever longing has produced the collection, it can be seen as a way of providing a controlled cohesion of identlity which is otherwise fractured and unstable.

This self possession through possessions is so strong that the loss of the collection can be likened to loss of self. The collection also offers an opportunity for immortality, as the materiality of the collection, of preserved intact can insure continuing integrity of the collector's identity after his/her death.

Collections provide a material encoding of the collectors desired identity.'

Rachel's Collections

My friend Rachel collects things; dolls, hearts, photos of shoes, graffitti......

There are some great photographs she has taken on her blog, photos from her travels near and far.

Rachel is also an expert on cabinets of curiosities having made her own 'Cabinet of Hearts' which contains lost hearts, each one telling it's own story.

Bottle Collections

whatever you collect, there will always be a webite!

Historic Bottle Collections

Catherine the Great Collector

From NY Times:

Catherine [the Great] began buying for her museum in 1764. By 1769 she had bought two of the greatest collections of drawings in Western Europe. One of them belonged to Count Cobenzl, then living in Brussels, who was minister plenipotentiary to Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and a leading figure in the administration of what was then the Austrian Netherlands.
With this single stroke, Catherine the Great acquired more than 4,000 master drawings by Western European artists. Sheets from the Cobenzl collection in the present show include examples of Poussin, Rubens, van Dyck, Primaticcio, Hans Holbein the Elder, Jacob Jordaens, Hendrick Goltzius, Guercino and Greuze. Every one of them is a touchstone of quality. In the Poussin ''Baptism'' -- a sketch for the painting of that name that is a part of Poussin's ''Seven Sacraments'' -- rigor and awe work as equal partners.
Catherine went on to buy 1,020 drawings from the collection of Count Heinrich Bruhl, who was at the time a minister at the court of Saxony in Dresden. Virtually on her own doorstep she also acquired the drawings -- almost 2,000 -- that had been collected by Count Butskoy, the president of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg.

A DVD Collection

This bloke has a lot of DVD's!

Dictators who collected

• Saddam Hussein - Sci-fi fantasy paintings featuring menacing dragons and barely-clad blondes.


• Adolf Hitler - Bavarian 18th century furniture. Munich antique dealers were ordered to keep an eye out for him.


• Kim Jong II - 20,000 videos (Daffy Duck cartoons, Star Wars, Liz Taylor and Sean Connery flicks)


• Idi Amin - Several racing cars and loads of old film reels of I Love Lucy reruns and Tom and Jerry cartoons


• Joseph Stalin - Westerns with Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable and John Wayne. Stalin also inherited Joseph Goebbels's films.

The Psychology of collecting

Why do we collect things? here is a link to an article by Mark B. McKinley, Ed.D on the psychology of collecting.



Podcast from the Frieze Art Fair.