Artists Texts

As part of Multitude we asked some of the artists involved to give us their view on collecting. Matthew Shelton, a studio holder at Patrick Studios and taking part in the Studio Programme element of Multitude, has from time to time been somewhat of a 'hoarder' so has first hand experience on the subject...

COLLECTING: précis

All this useless beauty
By a former steel mill on the outskirts of Rotherham I find lumps and blobs of slag and scrap steel, crusty with rust and lime.
The shapes assumed by the slag fragments amuse me. I start to collect them, and carry them home. I not only collect scrap steel and slag, but paper, wood and coal. Useless, abandoned things; bereft of purpose and stripped of value. To place this into context, I go prospecting in public spaces where I have no personal rights of ownership, I gather booty and remove it from public circulation; then, returning to my private space, I unpack my acquisitions, of which I am now the undisputed owner. So far, so good; I am engaged in an essentially harmless activity, creative and stimulating, with defined outputs and a sense of breaking new ground.
The lumps of scrap steel resemble beasts, punctuation marks, fossils, birds, wild flowers, turds. They have a curious mottled, russet appearance, stippled with umber and ochre.
Often, a piece of the steel will closely resemble a splash of viscous liquid; soap, sauce or syrup. These are the ones I cherish; these are the ones I value most in my new collection.
I blast clean the pieces of steel and slag. Each lump of raw, discarded matter has been subjected to a sustained, high pressure stream of ceramic beads: the rust and dirt has gone.
I have precisely one hundred in my collection: a ‘wunderkammer’ of useless things. I would like to show them on plain white simply supported shelves, evenly lit and very, very clean; blasted dross shining like fresh new steel; the object divested of its function, silent as to its origin and making.
To collect, according to Roger Cardinal, is to ‘launch individual desire across the intertext of environment and history. Every acquisition, whether crucial or trivial, marks an unrepeatable conjecture of subject, found object, place and moment.......the continuous thread through which selfhood is sewn into the unfolding fabric of a lifetime’s experience’.
All well and good? Not according to Jean Baudrillard, who tells us that the collector ‘can never shake off an air of impoverishment and depleted humanity’. Perhaps they’re both right; the collection and the act of collecting is a valid socio-cultural statement while the collector is somehow diminished by the act and must act on the fringes of respectability; infantile, indigent, acquisitive.
Let the collections themselves decide.
Matthew Shelton 2008