Written for Left Cultures publication 2021 & displayed at The Museum of Totterdown during FoundLand exhibition November 17th - 26th 2023 by way of explaining why I collect things.

I have Cinderella (a Ladybird edition) from when I was little, inside the book is an inscription from my mum in blue biro, it says “this book was bought by daddy for Angela and Maria on Monday 21st July 1969 on our day trip to Poole, Dorset. This was also the day the first men landed on the Moon.”

What I remember about that day trip was walking along the kerb holding my mum’s hand, playing the game where you try to walk only on the kerb as if it is a high tightrope, concentrating so hard I didn’t notice I had started to walk through fresh concrete, leaving a trail of my footprints - (my mum teased me that the police would be able to track me down and find me from my footprints and tell me off.)

So Cinderella leaves behind her shoe, men were leaving their footprints on the Moon for the first time and I was leaving my 5 year old footprints in concrete. King Lear is based on the fairy story of Cinderella - my cousin an author told me this - for instance in King Lear there are the three sisters Goneril and Regan and Cordelia; and in more gruesome tellings of Cinderella the ugly sisters have their eyes pecked out. 

One of the main scenes in King Lear is where the king is holding his daughter Cordelia in his arms and asks for a mirror to hold to her mouth to see if she is still breathing. I held a mirror to my mother’s mouth to see if she was still breathing - when I found her March 5th 1983 - I was 18 and we had been reading King Lear in my English Literature class..

Sorting through her things afterwards I found Daily Mirror newspapers she had kept from when Kennedy was assassinated and when the men landed on the Moon. So I began collecting, holding onto Daily Mirror newspapers also, but failed to collect just significant days - I accumulated piles and piles of newspapers. I also created a collection of found objects things people have lost, left or discarded on the street, for example I now (2021) have nearly 200 broken crushed or cracked car wing mirrors - the first one I picked up in 1983 the year of my mum’s suicide.

I’ve heard it’s a common response to the impact of loss - my compulsion to collect -  I always thought it was OK though as I was an artist so it’s all future materials -  the rejects, the left behind - stuff anyone can get hold of - did have hold of. I now have 49 categories of hundreds and hundreds of founds - each object noted with the date and where found in marker pen on masking tape - then bagged up in a see-through Asda freezer (evidence) bag. 

I’ve become fascinated by the patterns and repetitions and seasons of found objects - the beautiful fragile crumpled left behind fragments of the stories of people’s everyday lives.