Collecting ideas

A quieter Saturday than some of the previous ones, in part due - apparently - to the Airbourne show at Eastbourne, and in part due to the sun coming out as the afternoon went on - by late afternoon the view outside was irresistible, and most people headed outside to enjoy the return of our summer. Prior to that though it was another great session, with a wide range of people exploring the value of objects, in relation to the art on display, to their own lives, and in relation to ideas. Today's focus was on collecting words, descriptions and ideas, and highlighted a range of reactions to the work. One lady spoke of her "painful" response to Clockwork, as it spoke very directly to her of her personal circumstances, of the chaos that her disability often caused in her life and the way it ate so much time out of her life. I was struck by how moving she found the work, and the levels of interpretation this exhibtion can sustain. Another group - this time young archeologists - referred to the obvious archeological aspect of the pieces - the ways Takahashi shapes a story out of what is discarded or considered "throwaway", but that those stories are to be excavated, they are found within the layers of debris. Using play to identify what "stuff' is of value in people's lives has been illuminating, as has been the ways in which people decide where the value of the exhibits lies. One gent came striding through mid-way through the afternoon in search of the crisp packet collection, which is actually showing tomorrow (Sunday) but due to an error in the paper had been advertised for today also. He was full of purpose as he strode in and I was struck by the lovely idea of a collection of crisp packets generating such a physical response. Objects do indeed have great power, symbolic and otherwise, and the value and meaning in them is endlessly open to interpretation and utterly subjective. In our activities today some people's most valuable object was their Bible, for others it was an inexpensive brooch, or a little china bluebird, or Granny's biscuit barrel - what other people would dimiss as junk. The most potent art it would seem in this exhibition has been the power to make people examine their own relationships to the objects that make up the literal and metaphorical "stuff' of their lives.

1980's Crisp Packet collector creating a media storm...

As part of our Collectors' Corner season, we have Dave Valentine's 1980's Crisp Packet collection coming to the De La Warr Pavilion on Sunday 15th August at 2:30pm.

A media storm has been created and everyone seems to be talking about it...

Have a look at the following stories and get yourself down to the Pavilion on Sunday to see the collection and hear the talk for yourself! Click here for more information on the event.

The Sun

The Metro

Argus - Bexhill man's crisp bag collection

Newsround - man has £10,000 crisp collection

Studentbeans - crisp packets worth £10,000

Plus it has been on BBC Breakfast News and many other sites.


Here are some of the Twitter Comments:

BrightonBuzz Bexhill man's crisp bag collection worth a packet http://sns.ly/VH243

rohanjay Don't miss the world's greatest crisp packet collection - oh yes it is! - on show at the @DLWP Bexhill Sunday http://bit.ly/90jCkM

fob51 RT @dizzytigerstu: Silly season tabloid fame for our Dave & his crisp packet collection (The Sun http://tinyurl.com/2u7zotc etc).

brightonargus Bexhill man's crisp bag collection worth a packet http://bit.ly/c3Vwo2

discoverbexhill 1980s Crisp Packet Collection on show this Sunday at 2.30pm @dlwp. It's worth £10,000 and has generated lots of interest in national media.

PHONOGRAPHS AND JAPANESE DOLLS

Yesterday afternoon in Gallery 1 was a delightful treat with Dave Homewood bringing along several of his collection of phonographs with records and cylinders to play some wonderful old tunes for us.

Also on display were 7 of my own Japanese dolls or 'Kokeshi'.

About 70 to 100 people must have come along to see what was going on drawn in by the fabulous sound of voices from long ago singing down the length of the gallery. A buzzy atmosphere was created by people looking at Dave's wonderful machines and asking questions. A number of people were also specifically interested in asking about the Kokeshi.

At one point when quite a crowd had gathered I asked Dave some questions about his phonographs and about collecting in general.

We found out that for both of us our collections had started when we were children and a relative had given us something as a gift that kicked off a lifelong passion.

Nearly everyone had lovely gentle smiles on their faces as they heard the beautifully ghostly voices emanating from horns and cone-shaped speakers.

Guessing Games

Saturday 31^st July Reflecting on objects: an activity in three parts:

Part 1 Guessing Games

A small, green 1960s Antler suitcase lined with pink, watered satin bought from a Charity Shop for £1. Inside, a variety of mystery objects. Reach your hand in and pick one. Don’t think too much about which to pick, just take the first one your hand encounters. Take it out carefully so that no one else can see it and then look at it yourself, all the while keeping it hidden from others.

Next describe the object trying not to say what its function is (if it has one). What is it like? What shape is it? What colour? When someone guesses correctly place the object in the middle of the table until we have a collection.

Part 2 Relating to objects and to each other

Now, give your object to someone else who in turn gives theirs to another. Study your new object and think about something in your life it relates to. Then tell your story.

Part 3 Mini-installation

Place your story-object on the small, strange, two-tier metal trolley-on-a-lead that happens to be in the corner of the room. Everyone places their object until we have a mini-installation. We look at it, we discuss it. Look how the grain in the wood of the paintbrush handle echoes that of the lines on the curtain-rail finial. ‘Finial’? A word for the decorative end of a pole or banister for example. A new word I’d not heard before springing up from someone in the group.

Finally, we stand back and admire our new installation of objects, which have had an encounter with each other and with our lives as we have had with each other.

I could list the objects but to do so would not do them justice and it would spoil the games in case you are thinking of coming along to take part yourself.

But there is one I can name: a small, wooden Japanese Kokeshi doll. Next Sunday I will be bringing along more of my collection of Kokeshi and describing some of my mixed feelings about these strange and beautiful objects: Collectors’ Corner 2.30pm Sunday 8^th August.

Thanks to all those who took part last Saturday, it was all fun and enlightening.

Susan Diab

GAMES AND STORIES

My game set up by Eva.

I took a piece of my own work to the gallery on Sunday. It's a sort of game which first began in 2005 when I was exploring ideas about mapping and wayfinding. It started with the board. I was thinking about how blind people find their way around familiar places. I had been talking to blind friends about their strategies of counting paces; listening for changes in sounds; feeling changes in the air temperature, wind strength, the ground beneath their feet; all those things which sighted people don't think about most of the time. I used some tactile maps as references to mark out a trail on a big piece of board. That was the start of my game. I've added to it over the years and each time I set it up it's different. This week I brought it to the gallery to let other people decide how it should be set up.

Talking about how she decides on the way her installations will develop, Tomoko Takahashi has said that there is always a kind of story behind it - she sets up a background and starts imagining things. That was exactly what a little girl called Eva did with my game. Hers was a story of goodies and baddies and a great flood which the goodies had to escape from in boats which sailed across my board leaving a trail of markers for  people following on behind. Then they made a blockade to keep the baddies out of their area and set up (slightly wonky) red windmills to generate their electricity.

FLEAMARKET COMPOSITIONS

Above and below: photographs of objects at a fleamarket, Rachel Cohen.

 

Brighton based artist, Rachel Cohen, brought her collection of quirky photographs of objects displayed at fleamarkets to the De La Warr Pavilion this afternoon. The Collectors Corner presentation brought up questions regarding how we make decisions about ordering and organising things and the individuality of this process. Rachel told us how she had spent hours organising the photographs into an order which would "flow" for the slideshow, grouping the objects in the images by theme (such as religious icons), function (e.g.tools), shape or material. Then a second layer of organising was demonstrated within the pictures, this time not under Rachel's control, instead decided by the stall-holders themselves as they chose how to display the objects on their stalls, whether in chaotic heaps, colourful groups or ordered as rows or grids.

It was interesting to think about how Tomoko Takahashi decides how to position and "display" the objects in her installations and the "internal logic" which governs her decisions about the careful placement of individual items in her seemingly chaotic arrangements.

Rachel Cohen website

A month at a time

This Sunday was busy at the DLWP and it was great to see many people(of all ages) both at the exhibition and outside enjoying the sunshine. There was no time for swapping in the gallery today. The Pocillum was such a hit at Collectors Corner that we decided to keep the eggcups on display for most of the afternoon. Smalls -Murray, of Back Door Gallery had brought a variety of eggcups for viewing. These they had either found in junk shops and car boot sales or received through the post, donated by friends and members of the public throughout July 2008. The performance duo told us they always display the cups a month at a time and will never show the entire Collection as one exhibition. The Collection is ongoing and so far they have acquired around nine hundred items which are also stored in monthly groupings. Information about each cup is kept and discussed - every story becoming an integral part of the archive. Someone at Collector's Corner described a strange book shop in Liverpool where he was only allowed to see the books he requested, never the entire contents of the shop. However, there seems to be more than a need for control when curating The Pocillum; Smalls - Murray compared looking at the cups a month at a time to the pleasure to be had searching through one's loft and discovering forgotten treasures. "After all" they said, "Where's the fun to be had looking at a finished crossword?" And surely that's part of the pleasure everyone experiences when collecting? One of the audience suggested that they might feel too exposed were The Pocillum to be seen in total. They agreed; it is for them a very personal and private collection which they allow others to see (a bit). Gigi loved the show and talked about how she was moving from hoarder to minimalist. I asked what she attributed this to, age or necessity? She felt it was mix of both, but significantly as she grew older the need to define herself through her possessions had waned.

It was lovely talking with Marcia and her friend who wished to be known only as "Mystery Man". He seemed to be a collector of stories and vividly told us of an Irish woman he briefly knew over fifty years ago, described by Marcia as the 'love of his life'. Marcia didn't see the point of Takahashi's show. "I don't get it, it's not art, it's not beautiful, just a pile of rubbish. I've got that kind of stuff in my shed and people say to me 'why do you keep that — all those coat hangers you don't need?' " Mystery Man felt it needed a second look, that the work might be appreciated for its abstract qualities and we talked for a while about the eggcups. Suddenly, Marcia suggested she could make an installation with old 'useless' objects from her grandfather, father, etc and that would have meaning. "There you go!" her anonymous friend said.

Many thanks to Smalls - Murray for sharing The Pocillum, Judith Adler for the photo and everyone who took time to talk.