The clutter project started as an idea just over a year ago, soon after I moved house. I found myself surrounded by bags and boxes of mostly unsorted stuff, because no matter how organised I had tried to be before the move, and despite the fact that it probably took me longer than anyone in history to take all my belongings from one house to the other, there still came a time when everything that was left got thrown randomly into whatever container it fitted in and sat for far too long in a pile in whatever corner was free when it arrived.
There were clothes that I'd forgotten I ever owned; mountains of paper that I had intended sorting and dumping before the move; missing toy parts; old shoes; photos; books; dvds and games; art supplies; artworks, mirrors and other items that had come down from the old house walls but might not find space on the new ones; saucepans and kitchen accessories which couldn't fit in my now tiny kitchen space; lamps and lamp shades; garden tools and seeds; bedclothes, curtains and throws; jewellery and perfume; candles; ornaments; roller skates and all kinds of assorted bits and pieces which don't appear to belong any where.
Look at the photo for example. In this one small pile there's a rusted millennium 50p from 1988; a conker; a paint tester pot; an old phone; a Harry Potter Lego piece; a necklace I loved, that's at least 20 years old; never used headphones; a bead; a strange piece of metal that must be for something and a piece of fabric with sample machine stitches that I have no recollection of ever seeing before.
I've just bought my first house after years of renting and it's smaller than where we left, needs a lot of work but has a great big garden and lots of potential. The rooms seemed big enough until all our 'stuff' arrived. At first I resisted the urge to shove it all in the attic before sorting out what to keep, then I shoved it all in the attic. It all had to come down again a few months later for insulation to go in and most of it was piled in the bathroom and bedrooms. It's now some what sorted and back in the attic.
Looking at the clutter daily led me, among other things, to question the way most of us live. We spend a lot of our time amassing our personal collection of consumer items and a lot more time hiding all these away from sight, spending more money on big houses with lots of space for storage, so that we can decorate them in a minimalist style. Most people are on a constant quest to clean and declutter their homes, while they also continue to buy more and more things they don't really need.
So the clutter project started as an observation on consumerism and materialism, but it is also about celebrating the beauty in the ordinary, the things we often ignore or hide. This is my stuff, a visible reflection of my life so far. Many of the objects have strong memories attached, others were interesting or useful enough to be kept for themselves or sometimes just in case they would be necessary for some unknown reason later. The clutter project is a means of documenting my identity expressed through the objects I've collected in life, but apart from that the random juxtaposition of colours and textures in the clutter were worth recording and so the project began with a series of photos of my clutter and is slowly developing into a collection of artworks. I want to acknowledge the bursary I received from Longford Arts Office which gave me the push I needed to get going, and more confidence in my abilities to succeed, as well as financial assistance. This blog is to record the process, and my thoughts on it as these take shape.
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