My plan for my degree show has always been to explore collecting. When I first began this year I was intending to focus on the display of collections and the difference between a collection a hoard, an obsession and a group. Whilst doing my dissertation it opened up this subject a lot wider for me allowing me to delve deeper into the subject. And while the dissertation did answer a lot of my queries, mainly the one being I was never going to really find the true meaning of a collection; until this day now, there is still a vast range of contrasting opinions on the actual definition. It was from this I wondered how I was going to explore this with my work. Even if I pushed the display of collecting within these areas would I gain anything about my art or learn anything from it? What was I really trying to say in my work?
I hit a stumbling block for quite a while once at this point. I was still collecting but I didn’t know why, nothing really connected anymore, I didn’t know what I wanted to show or say. I was arranging my collections vaguely but nowhere near as explored and varied as I know I could. I just lost motivation with it. I loved Damien Hirt’s way of displaying his objects. I wanted to be creative like this with mine, I just couldn’t. I was becoming so intrigued with finding all these key theorists ideas on collecting and comparing to artist’s that I wasn’t really making work that said anything really like they did.
I knew I wanted to look at Tracey Emin in my dissertation, as ever since visiting her exhibition at The Hayward Gallery, London, two years ago. I had been captivated by her grotesque collecting; representing herself through these personal collections. It was once carrying out a lot of research about her I decided to have a chapter in the theme of ‘Biography of Collections’. It was through this and researching artist’s who work in this area where new ideas started to spring from. I needed to make my collections this personal, even perhaps abject to really explore this area I was so interested in. They had to contain more of me, literally.
It did take me a while to realise this, but I feel my work came out stronger because of it. Although I did first feel my dissertation hindered my studio work; whatever I was doing I always felt like I should be doing the other. It did in fact bring out this realisation that to portray myself in the degree show, I needed to make my collections so much more personal. It was from the make-up wipes where my work then took off. Collecting items more and more abject and personal to myself.
Once developing my collecting through this personal but abject sense my ideas became a lot more focused on what I wanted to display in the degree show. Since my work changed direction I have wanted to make a space which represents me. However it soon developed through my work, to me then wanting to create a self portrait of me. Not the traditional way though. I wanted it to be through my waste material; through items which have had that personal contact with me; or hold traces of my remains. It had to be the traces of me through this auto-biographical collecting.
My work has become a lot about auto-biography. I wanted my degree show space to portray me, but to also show the repetitiveness of my daily routine; and this sense of similar items, pattern, repetition. It in a way is boring, but that is what most daily routines are in fact, boring. Putting make-up on isn’t exactly joyful or exciting, it is a very tedious and long process, but it is part my my routine; it portrays me. It does represent me and my fear of not having it on means I will succumb to this repetitiveness.
