things

I have been contemplating the relationship I have to things - objects, that is. This in part because of several conversations I have had with various people lately, some of them questioning my desire for -  and collecting of - what amounts to garbage. I am drawn to collect various cast-offs to the point of obsession: rusty metal things, crow and raven feathers, bits of broken or disassembled clocks and machines, the requisite beach bits (a must for a prairie-born scavenger like myself). Even here, in this small apartment, I am unable to stop myself from bringing random things home as I find them (it's more like they have found me).

Really the question is why? Why this particular affinity for particular forms of detritus? On one level the answer is simple - it is fodder for my work, and they are objects with shapes and textures that I find pleasing. But this does beg the question, really, and raises another whole set of questions about the nature of my work. Perhaps I need to engage in a process similar to that if Roger-Pol Droit in his book How Are Things? and catalogue my response and relationship with the objects I collect, or at the very least, examine my fascination with the categories of things that increasingly inhabit my world. (This book is, by the way, a delightful read - and a fascinating exploration of the relationship between objects, their roles in our lives, and the emotional and physical connections we have with them.)

I find myself beginning this examination with a passage from Droit's book, that bear reproducing here:

"Is anyone really persuaded that our external reality teaches us nothing? That their [things']  quantity is indifferent, their diversity without significance? That their variety, categories, genealogies and metamorphoses are as nothing -- just so many irrelevant culs-de-sac? On the contrary. Things have no residence other than in their absolute singularity. Matter in this particular place, under this particular form. Displaying this colour and no other. This texture and no other. This degree of wear and tear and no other. Each thing is itself and no other." (pp 9 - 10)

It is indeed this - the singularity of each object that I encounter  - that draws my initial attention. But this could be true of any collection;  so the additional layer of understanding that must be gained revolves around the particular categories of object that I collect, and what whose categories and the individual characteristics of the objects within each category provide in that way of ... what? Satisfaction of some sort? Understanding?