SECRET STASH:ACCUMULATION, HOARDING AND THE LOVE OF STUFF

curated byKIRSTY ROBERTSON

McIntosh GalleryWestern University, CanadaFebruary 28-April 6, 2013

Germaine KohAllyson MitchellPayton TurnerKelly Wood

catalogue illustrations and cover by Shannon Gerard

In his famous article “Unpacking my Library,” critic and philosopher Walter

Benjamin describes the process of unpacking his beloved books after a move. Each

book triggers a series of memories of how it came into his possession, and his love

for the collection is palpable. Each item that he describes is associated with a distinct

provenance, a series of memories that make the books not just objects moving

from box to shelf, but an external representation of himself. He reflects on how his

collection began with solely books he had read before expanding dramatically into a

collection of future possibilities – the unread volumes full of tantalizing ideas waiting

to be discovered. The article is a seminal one in studies of collecting, and for good

reason – it very accurately captures both the joy in possessing objects and the burden

of carrying them around. “There is in the life of the collector,” he writes, “a dialectical

tension between the poles of disorder and order.”1 He continues, “for what else is this

collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent

that it can appear as order?”2

What happens, however, when the collection controls its owner, and when the

disorder can no longer appear as order except through constant denial on the part of

the collector. We live in a world overrun with stuff. In her popular book The Story of

Stuff, Annie Leonard notes that in 2004-2005 US Americans spent two-thirds of their

$11 trillion national economy on consumer goods. Repercussions for the environment,

labour and the distribution of moneys (for example, more is spent each year on shoes,

jewellery and watches than on higher education) are difficult to calculate.3 The stuff

we make and discard does not leave the world, but remains in both measurable and

immeasurable ways – in landfills, in toxic effluent, in objects cluttering houses and

closets. There is joy in these bought objects, but there is also guilt in the weight of their

presence. Like Benjamin’s books, collections tend to spill from their boundaries, the

objects become dated, and the former love is forgotten. Secret Stash: Accumulation,

Hoarding and the Love of Stuff looks at the tensions inherent in having stuff: the joy

and burden of ownership, the love of collecting, pleasure in rescuing objects from

thrift stores, the spread of consumer objects, and the weighted memories found in

things. It also looks at hoarding, not so much as a pathology, but as a way of being in a

world weighed down with things that collectively are more disordered than ordered.

Secret Stash includes the work of artists Germaine Koh, Allyson Mitchell,

Payton Turner and Kelly Wood as well as a community intervention, a “yarn bomb”

encasing the trees at the entrance to the gallery in colourful wool cozies. The initial

squares for this project were knitted by students enrolled in a class on fashion and

textiles offered by the Department of Visual Arts at Western University, Canada. With

the help of three community members, all sixty-one students learned how to knit,

and in doing so also learned about the labour involved in making clothing and other

textile goods. As the project grew, the public was invited to participate, and hundreds

Clutter, Collecting and a Hoarding Society

Kirsty Robertson

of squares were donated from the London community and beyond. The end result is

a rich tapestry of making and collecting. Many were the people who told us that their

squares were made from their own “secret stashes” of yarn and wool, now part of a

colourful entranceway to the exhibition.

Inside the McIntosh doors, Germaine Koh’s Knitwork unfurls across the west

gallery – a giant soft sculpture made from unraveling and reknitting used sweaters

into a colossal scarf that spills over the whole floor. Knitwork, like many of Koh’s other

installations and interventions, is a part of a conceptual practice that brings “attention

to the poetics of daily life.”4 Here, as elsewhere, this is achieved through small

interventions or repeated actions that ask viewers and participants to contemplate

bigger questions of time, memory, ecology, social norms and behaviours.

Covering two walls of the exhibition space, Payton Turner’s damask wallpaper

installation The Lookout Circle Collection at first appears to be nothing more than a

luxurious backdrop to the exhibition. A closer examination, however, quickly reveals

that the damask pattern is made from tens of thousands of tiny stickers, each a picture

of a consumable object (cars, clothing, food). The work is magical, playful, whimsical,

but within the context of this exhibition it takes on a darker note. On the one hand

it speaks to the bespoke and the love of skill and craft in the handmade, but as the

elegant pattern dissolves into consumer objects it speaks too of obsession, sumptuous

living and over-indulgence.

Four photos from Kelly Wood’s series Vancouver Carts, (2005-) hang opposite

Turner’s wallpaper. Showing shopping carts full of the carefully-chosen and collected

possessions of itinerant dwellers on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the photos tell

a starkly different tale of consumption, possession and dispossession than does the

sumptuous wallpaper. Wood’s series, which draws on an impulse to record found

also in her previous work (such as the well-known Garbage Project where for five

years she recorded her carefully packaged household waste), documents the filled

shopping carts of the homeless that individually are often near invisible, but serialized

are unavoidable in their stark beauty and unsettling depictions of the care with which

collections of needed and wanted objects are amassed and organized.

Finally, the small east gallery at the McIntosh is occupied entirely with

Allyson Mitchell’s Menstrual Hut Cinema, a feminist fort and self-contained structure

constructed from discarded blankets, rugs and cushions. The space is created entirely

from thrifted goods, rescued from a cycle of consumption that often discards the

handmade. Any thrift store in Canada, notes Mitchell, will provide her with a wealth

of handmade rugs, cushions and blankets. The walls of the Cinema are made from

hangings created from rug hooking kits, a popular “female” activity in the 1970s. “I

think of lonely, isolated women in front of the TV making something like this,” she

says.5 Inside, the work is intimate and cozy, it brings a space of comfort into the white

walls of the gallery - a place literally to curl up and watch a film. But the installation

is also over-stimulating – it is comfortable, but maybe like a too-thick sweater or an

overly-cluttered room, it is too intimate, and excessively disclosing.

Each of the works in Secret Stash takes innocent or familiar objects – sweaters,

stickers, shopping carts, blankets and cushions – and reveals something deeper at

work: the exhausting task of reworking hundreds of sweaters or applying thousands of

stickers, the careful collection of goods that might otherwise be considered garbage.

The works suggest an over-saturation, a connection to goods and objects that is

too strong and occasionally overwhelming. Most are playful, fun, and colourful. But

together, they present an archeology of an affluent society, collected, reassembled,

organized and arranged into patterns that both disguise and reveal clutter and

social norms of possession and dispossession. The exhibition plays on the idea that

overconsumption has turned North American society into a hoarding one, that is, a

society that finds both beauty and challenge in the amassing and accrual of objects.

***

Until the mid-twentieth century, hoarding was associated with keeping

money rather than spending it. It was associated with miserliness, penny-pinching

and refusing to part with one’s wealth.6 Hoarding was generally the purview of

the already rich, although occasionally (as with Silas Marner and a series of other

middle-class fictional characters) it filtered down to the middle classes.7 Only in the

mid-twentieth century was the hoarding of goods rather than gold, or trash rather

than cash, recognized as an anomaly, and even then it was regarded largely as an

eccentricity. In the early to mid-2000s, something changed. Over the past decade,

television series, books, websites and the medical establishment have revealed the

disorder in the disorder. Hoarding has been pathologized – recognized in the 2012

version of the DSM as a mental illness, and popularly regarded as such. As a result,

it is now believed to be widespread, affecting as much as 5% of the population and

enveloping its victims in extreme accumulation coupled with an unwillingness to part

with goods. It is overwhelming, excessive, maximalist, but often secret. The hoard is a

secret stash.

The exhibition, however, largely leaves behind the medical condition, and

instead looks at hoarding as a social and cultural phenomenon. In the sense that stuff

simply accumulates, hoarding is actually quite socially acceptable. Says one hoarder

in the short film Possessed by Martin Hampton: “it’s almost like a dream. You’ve got

to have it. You hear something or see something and you want it so much you’ve

got no choice but to buy it.”8 There is a very thin line separating this hoarder, who

remains nameless in the film, but admits to buying one hundred units of the same

cellular phone, and the 74 per cent of Los Angeles residents, who, in a recent study of

family life in North America, were shown to park their cars in the driveway because

the garage had become a holding place for the vast amount of stuff leaking out of the

house.9

Thus, in this exhibition, there are no heaping piles of stuff, there are no

terrifying landscapes of trash, but hoarding and over-collecting nevertheless linger.

The exhibition treats over-consumption as almost, but not quite, normal. In these

works accumulation is varied – it’s not always out of control, but there’s a futility to

purging, an often unmarked but present idea that there is nowhere for the stuff to go.

It ends up in a thrift store, re-knit into a giant scarf, stashed in a shopping cart, and

arranged into a series of ornate patterns on the wall. The purpose of the exhibition is

not to overstate the symptoms of hoarding, as reality television shows like Hoarders

tend to do, but to show the ubiquity of it – the secret and not-so-secret stashes that

re-arranged can be comforting (like the cinema and scarf), humorous (like the wall

paper) or disconcerting (like the shopping carts).

***

The “original” hoarders, if they might be called that, were two New York brothers.

Homer and Langley Collyer were born to a wealthy New York family in the 1880s. The

brothers’ great-grandfather, William Collyer, built one of the largest shipyards on the

East River waterfront.10 A great-uncle, Thomas Collyer, ran the first steamboat line on

the Hudson River and the family owned a grand piano that had been a gift from Queen

Victoria. The two brothers received excellent educations and lived an upper class life,

though with some eccentricities. Their parents were first cousins – a marriage that

shocked the family – and both of their parents were unconventional. Their father

was famous for canoeing down the Hudson River to work and then portaging home

through Manhattan with his canoe over his head. The Collyers lived at the northern

outskirts of the fashionable city, in an area that after their parents’ deaths became

Harlem. Issues of race and class cut through the Collyer story. The two brothers, who

became increasingly isolated from family and friends as they grew older, were vocally

critical of the racial changes in their neighbourhood – the flight of upper middle and

upper class families to the suburbs and the influx of poorer African Americans. They

repeatedly expressed their fears of invasion, and Langley talked openly of installing

traps to prevent thieves entering the house. Their fear of invasion had the unwitting

result of suggesting that the house contained immense wealth.

In fact, the house was full, but not necessarily of valuable goods. In 1947 the

police received an anonymous message that there was a body in the Collyer mansion.

Police visited the house, but found the front door jammed shut, blocked by what

turned out to be meters thick piles of paper. After entering the house through a

second floor window they found the body of Homer Collyer, emaciated and recently

dead. Homer, who was blind and paralyzed, had starved to death surrounded by stuff.

The house was packed floor to ceiling, with rooms accessible only through what were

described at the time as “goat paths” – narrow paths leading precariously through the

piles of stuff. Many of these had been booby trapped. It took eighteen days for the

police to find Langley’s body even though it was only about ten feet from Homer’s.

Langley had accidentally triggered one of his own booby traps and piles of paper had

fallen on him, crushing him. He didn’t die instantly. Trapped between a piano and piles

of books, newspapers and other detritus he lingered for many hours.

The story fascinated New Yorkers. For a time it was thought that the house

would be full of treasures and cash, but this proved not to be the case. 140 tons of

stuff, including fourteen pianos (among them Queen Victoria’s), an x-ray machine,

their father’s canoe, thousands of newspapers, a horse’s jawbone, prams, bicycles,

food, beds, stoves, a car, thousands of books, human organs pickled in jars, hundreds

of yards of silks, textiles and tapestries and countless other items, as well as rats,

insects and numerous cats filled the space of what was an extremely large house, if

not a mansion. There was so much stuff that investigators could not figure out where

Langley slept, and surmised that he must have bedded down in the narrow passages

through the rooms.

The Collyer brothers’ story has a macabre edge that has fascinated people for

decades. A house full of oddities owned by two eccentric unmarried brothers became

the bizarre stuff of mystery and legend. In turn, the brothers became the definition of

eccentric hoarders tinged with a certain ghoulishness. Thus, until recently, hoarding

was seen not necessarily as an illness but rather as a kind of withdrawal from society,

a passion for stuff and collecting coupled with a refusal to confront everyday reality.

Recently, however, the rhetoric around hoarding has changed dramatically

from eccentricity to illness, and from amazingly anomalous to amazingly ubiquitous.

The pathologization of hoarding in the 2012 DSM, complete with a recognizable

symptomatology transformed it from an eccentricity into a mental illness with

accompanying treatments. At least some of the changed perception of hoarding has

to do with the popularity of popular culture depictions.11 For example, the television

show Hoarders premiered in August 2009 and Hoarding: Buried Alive followed not

long after. These shows were concerned with showcasing the lives of severe hoarders,

but as a number of critics noted, they also inadvertently created links between severe

hoarding and more ambient hoarding symptomatic of an over-consuming society.

Corina Chocano, writing in the New York Times Magazine suggests,

Hoarding shows are themselves hoarded out with metaphors for … all of our

modern predicaments. Watching the televised hoarders gingerly scale the

hostile terrain of their modest rooms, with the precipitous heights and narrow

passes, like a dazed herd of wayward Alpine goats, it’s hard not to get anxious

and apocalyptic about materialism and junk culture. Maybe that’s a good

thing. Maybe the shows’ popularity hints at a collective longing to sort it all

out; at a feeling that there’s something underneath it all that’s worth digging

out and holding on to; at a lingering hope that the experts will be along any

minute now to coax us gently into letting go.12

On the same theme, Will Self writes of the landscapes he calls “traumatic

interiors,” “Actually, my suspicion is that the compulsive hoarder craziness is an even

more craven attempt to affect such a catharsis. As the crack team of cleaners goes into

the bungalow, black bags and bug spray at the ready, we sit on the sofa watching and,

for a few dreamy minutes, can forget all about the landfill-in-waiting that surrounds

us.”13

Both writers point to extreme cases of hoarding as a reflection of what is

happening on a wider scale; that hoarding and excessive clutter are the backdrop of

late capitalist accumulation. And while this may be the case, the solution of garbage

bags and therapy is perhaps too simple, for it denies the connection that most people

feel to their possessions.14 Legal writer Amy Gutman, drawing on Law Professor

Margaret Joan Radin, notes “we’d be more distressed to return home and find our

living room sofa gone than to learn that the value of our home had dropped by a few

percentage points. This is because certain possessions are ‘self-constitutive.’ They are

intimately bound up with our sense of who we are.”15 Her statement finds a corollary

in Benjamin’s love for his collection of books. In a similar vein, textile scholar and artist

Janis Jefferies notes, “objects which might appear to be common place have a history

of particular times and places: the domestic space of childhood clutter and lovers’

mantelshelves, charity shops and car boot sales seduce me, at least, into intimate

scenarios of memory and reminiscence.”16 Objects are special, or they can be. The

question then becomes, what does it mean when the amount of stuff constituting that

selfhood has tripled, quadrupled, quintupled in size? Is the personhood that much

bigger, or is it exploding at the seams?

To answer the question, we first back away from it. In capitalist societies the cycle

of consumption includes not just the purchase of goods, but also their obsolescence

(frequently planned) and their discard, making room for new purchases. Real hoarders,

those who are seen to have a medical problem, actually break a capitalist cycle of

purchase and discard – the cycle gets stuck so that the material goods, which are

actually accorded very little value in a traditional cycle of obsolescence are accorded

importance far beyond their actual worth. Items that many would regard as junk are

granted extreme value – the cycle of consume and discard cannot complete itself.

Without the final step – purging, where the accumulated stuff moves to the landfill,

thrift store or even the garage (out of sight out of mind), hoarding represents not an

anti-capitalist state but a kind of fugue of broken capitalism.

For the hoarders in Randy Frost’s book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the

Meaning of Things, now a seminal text on hoarding, the tale is not one of money or

acquisition, but of overly investing in objects. The author tells the story of Irene, whose

house is piled high with useless articles, but for whom each object tells a complicated,

intricate story. The objects connect her to her friends and her family, they are clues to

her place in the world. She cannot throw out a gum wrapper or piece of paper with a

phone number scrawled on it because it might have significance. While her hoarding is

bankrupting her, the love that she has for the objects around her, and the way that she

sees them holistically, presents a jewel-like view of the world. The hoard of a hoarder

is over-replete with memories.

This emotional over-investment in objects is rarely covered in popular culture

depictions of hoarding, which focus almost entirely on the hoard itself, the process of

accumulation, and the excessive clutter inside the homes of hoarders. What shows like

Hoarders and Buried Alive do is repair the capitalist cycle. By clearing out the home

they create a space for the acquisition of new stuff while obfuscating the complicated

relationships that many hoarders have with their collections. A different way of looking

at these clear-outs might be to reframe the hoard as an evocative metaphor of the

cycle of consumption. Typically, ownership ends when the object is discarded. Yet,

that which remains in the home or collection gives only a fractional understanding

of consumption, precisely because it does not include the many objects (perishable

and otherwise) that have been discarded. But before the mass clear-outs take place,

hoarders’ homes clearly illustrate the consequences of over-consumption. As walls

collapse and floors buckle under the weight of accumulated stuff, the homes of

hoarders literally demonstrate the unsustainability of a consumption-based society.

The backdrop to the hoarding society is that there is always, quite literally, more

stuff. The objects that clutter homes and landfills are easily available, in great number,

and often for little cost. To take just one example, the rise in the amount of clothing in

circulation in the past ten years has been precipitous. In large part, this increase is due

to agreements made in the early 1990s by Global North powers to drop regulations on

the textile trade in order to create the World Trade Organization. Formerly protective

trade quotas were removed in a ten-year process leading up to 2005 and the end of

the Multifiber Arrangement (an immensely complicated collection of agreements that

had heretofore controlled the global trade in apparel and other textile goods).17 Trade

was deregulated, and what had been a quest for market share became an endeavour

simply to expand the market as much as possible. What resulted was a vast increase

in the circulation of clothing in global markets: clothing companies that used to have

two or three seasons per year, now regularly have upwards of twenty.18 Disposable

fashion and fast couture are a couple of the appellations for this extreme growth in

the circulation of textiles and clothing. Without a complicated quota system, clothing

can be manufactured much more efficiently in much larger quantities for much less

money.

Demand has also grown exponentially, driven by a buy and discard consumer

culture. Production of man-made fibers, such as polyester (which is a compound

derived from petroleum) has doubled in the last fifteen years. Cotton too, which has

a massive environmental footprint accounting for a quarter of all pesticides used in

the United States, has also rapidly expanded over the past ten years.19 There is a good

reason for this increased production. By 2005, according to Boston College sociologist

Juliet B. Schor, the average consumer was purchasing one new piece of clothing every

five and a half days, much of it lying unworn.20

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the ubiquity of the presence of clothing,

in almost all of the descriptions of hoarders Randy Frost includes in his book Stuff,

clothing is front and centre, over-bought, over-collected and often stored out in the

open. In more than one case, Frost describes how his clients cannot stand having their

clothing out of sight in drawers and closets. Instead clothing must be seen or it is not

accessible or properly possessed. Again, hoarding appears to challenge the buy and

discard/hide the evidence of more common patterns of over-consumption.

There is a term for clothes hoarding – latent waste, garbage waiting to be

created. For some, clothing becomes part of a hoard, for others it continues in the

capitalist cycle and is discarded or donated. In the five years between 2001 and

2006, donations to Goodwill industries – a large charitable organization that sells

clothing in North America – increased 67 per cent. 2.5 billion pounds of clothing were

donated in the United States alone, which nevertheless represented only 15 per cent

of all discarded fashion in that time period.21 The rest ended up in landfills, some

of it recycled for industrial use or resold through sites such as eBay, and much of it

repackaged and sold in tertiary markets, particularly in Africa and Asia. In developing

countries, the circulation of all this second-hand American clothing undermines local

industry and production, but makes a great deal of money for the companies that ship

the goods (generally North American and European). In 2003, several years before the

fashion and apparel numbers truly exploded, but the last year for which numbers are

available, US Americans alone shipped seven billion pounds of clothing to markets

in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. In many African countries bales of used clothing

are the number one import from the United States. Sending enormous quantities of

disposable clothing away re-imagines Africa and Eastern Europe as storehouses for

the latent waste of the Global North. Poor countries often provide the raw materials

and labour that go into producing clothing in the first place, and then also provide

locales for the storage and slow decay of cotton, wool and petroleum-based clothing

(none of which disintegrate “cleanly” – wool, for example produces ammonia when it

decays, polyester barely decays at all).22 Although these environmental issues are not

considered in depth in the exhibition, they are essential to a buy and discard society

that transforms a significant part of the world, particularly the Global South, into a

storage site for a gigantic hoard of no longer used or loved objects. It is a question

confronting everyone: where can we put all the stuff?

On a smaller scale, Frost found significant evidence of his hoarding clients’

attempts to organize and to gain control over their personal hoards through storage.

Plastic see-through cartons, files and so on are everywhere in hoarders’ houses, but

rarely are they used for storage. Instead, they become part of the hoard itself. In some

cases the hoard expands beyond the bounds of the house, into rented storage units.

So-called “normal” hoarders – those who overconsume, but whose collections are

not pathologized – especially use off-site storage. When revisiting her storage locker

after having stashed her stuff there for a decade, writer Amy Gutman describes both

her nervousness at what she would find, and her fear that many of the objects would

have been destroyed by mould and damp. Instead what she mostly found was junk

– outdated computers, notes and textbooks that no longer had any meaning to her,

and only a very few objects of sentimental value. On the whole though, she calculated

that she had spent $10,000 to save objects that had been meaningful only in a certain

moment in time.23

“Perhaps holding close to my belongings has been a compensation of sorts,

a way of making up for the absence of other enduring ties,” ponders Gutman. She

writes,

We live in an era of lost homes and lost jobs, of vertiginous stock market swings

and careening retirement plans. The ambient surround of loss and fear can

make us acutely sensitive to the costs of letting go — so much so that we may

lose sight of the costs of holding on. In an era where family homes were paid

off and passed on through generations, a sense of connection to place and

possessions may well have tended to enhance our collective well-being. But

in this time of unpredictable turbo-charged change, such attachments often

come at tremendous cost both in dollars and in human pain.24

Amy Gutman’s analysis of her own clutter as a fear of letting go, brings me to

the last major point that I want to make in this essay. Above, I wrote briefly about a

changing international and global economy that deregulated the trade in textiles and

apparel, and though I didn’t specifically mention it there, effectively decimated the

North American textile industry. The expense of labour contributed to the now well-

documented transfer of manufacturing out of the Global North and into countries

first in the Global South (for example Mexico and Latin America), and then into Asia,

particularly China. Manufacturing certainly still exists in North America, but on a much

smaller scale than it once did.25 What remains has been called a post-Fordist economy,

one built on extracting profit from intellectual and affective labour. The change is

visibly apparent. Take the fascinating example of storage facilities in California. There,

there are a series of storage operations made up of shipping containers, which became

surplus goods themselves as the US trade deficit grew. Californians were storing their

excessive consumption in the carcasses of their manufacturing industries.26

Consumption practices rise rapidly with industrialization, but they rise even

more rapidly with de-industrialization. As factories are replaced with immaterial

labour, it appears that consumption actually skyrockets, perhaps in part because

access to cheap goods made elsewhere increases as well. In 2007, consumption in

the United States reached an average high of 96 per cent of income.At that time,

according to the Wall Street Journal, Americans were spending more than $1.2 trillion

US dollars on unnecessary goods – on luxury consumption.27 As Robert Frank notes

in a popular non-fiction book, real income in the United States is not increasing, but

spending habits are, meaning that savings are lower than ever before, while debt is

increasing.28 Americans also, at the time, carried $2.5 trillion in credit card debt, for an

average of $6500 per cardholder (with many holding more than one indebted credit

card).29 Under neoliberalism, economic prosperity depends upon consumption, even if

that consumption takes place through debt accumulation. Debt is then repackaged as

derivatives, the financial products that crashed the economy in 2008. And the profits

from debt management form another kind of hoard or stash, this time returning to an

earlier definition of hoarding associated with money and miserliness.

The cycle of consumption is obviously not sustainable, but it is essential. The

accrual of personal debt contributes directly to the expansion of GDP and in turn to

the perception of economic growth. The International Monetary Fund report from

which some of these statistics come expressed deep concern with any potential

decline in consumption in the United States after the 2008 crisis and sought new

ways to encourage consumer spending.30 If prosperity depends on buying, a hoarding

mentality seems an inevitability.

There is a certain geological layering to the ways of understanding hoarding

and a hoarding society. At the first level there is a love of objects and an investment

in ownership and collecting. On top of that there is a much greater ease in amassing

and accruing such objects – some of which become part of the collection and some of

which (in the case of the non-hoarder) are discarded. However, the purchase of these

goods subtracts wealth from the buyer (many of the hoarders Frost considers are

near bankruptcy) while enriching numbers of sellers and other wealth holders. The

siphoning of wealth from the many to the few is also a characteristic of neoliberalism

that creates a hoard of wealth at the top and at the bottom only a fleeting sense of

joy in ownership. A person so defined through their possessions might expect a rise

in happiness, but finds instead an increase in anxiety, a fraying of social bonds, and

a variety of post-millenial pathologies, including hoarding, now defined as a mental

illness.

Much of Secret Stash, reflects on the fleeting moments of joy associated with

consumption. As Frost found in his interviews with hoarders, a hoard is not just a stash

of stuff, but also a document of future potential. A yarn hoard or stash, for example,

is not only suffused with memories and interactions, but also with infinite future

possibilities of what can be made. The art works in the show bring out a sense of

wonder, they reflect the comfort that is often projected onto consumer goods. But

they are brought back to earth through Wood’s photographs, which inject into the

exhibition a shot of reality that disrupts and reveals the deception in the comfort of

the cinema, the decadence of the wallpaper, the festivity of the yarn bomb.

As a whole, the juxtaposition of the works in the exhibition demand a great

deal of the viewer. They demand a contemplation of the lengthy process of applying

stickers to make Turner’s wallpaper, or the thousands of stitches making up Koh’s scarf.

Both speak at once to the incredible structures of labour underlying the production

of consumer goods, but also to much slower processes of reclaiming labour and of

putting time into the handmade – processes that are seen also in the blankets, rugs

and cushions used in Mitchell’s work, and in the yarn decorating the trees outside the

McIntosh Gallery.

Mitchell, for example, begins with a discarded hoard – the detritus of a society

uninterested in the handmade and in women’s work – and reassembles it into a

satiating environment. Her work captures the wealth of emotion and the affective

impact and potential memories of those objects and the people who first created

them. Koh’s work does something similar, unraveling and reknitting used sweaters.

Both refuse the erasure of the engagement that the maker, wearer or purchaser have

with consumption.

Meanwhile Payton Turner’s wallpaper comments on luxury and labour. The

patterns on the wall leap out at the viewers before dissolving into 70,000 images of

tiny mushrooms, daisies, cats, jellybeans, and popsicles repeatedly applied. It is a

child’s fantasy sticker collection, a hip homemaker’s dream wallpaper, and a document

of extensive process and time.

And finally, Kelly Wood’s Vancouver Carts series documents a mostly hidden

world, an end stage of late capitalism and its collateral damage of homelessness.

Compositionally rich, the photos are the only representational documents in the

exhibition. They are the only images of collections, the only visual representations

(rather than actual installations) of objects carefully chosen and arranged in space.

And what they show is broken, but beautiful. A fitting metaphor for the secret stash.

List of Works

GERMAINE KOH (Canadian, b. 1967)Knitwork 1992 ongoingmixed fibres 2.0 x 60.0 meters (ongoing, increasing length)Collection, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Purchased with financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance program and with the assistance of the E. Wallace Fund, 2001. Acc. No. 2000/1157

ALLYSON MITCHELL (Canadian)Menstrual Hut Cinema 2009overall size is h: 4’, w: 6’, d: 10’Wood, video monitor, speakers, found textiles, shag carpet, pillows and the following films:Afghanimation, 5 min, 2008, Allyson MitchellSticker Lover, 1 min, 2003, Allyson MitchellMy Life in 5 Minutes, 7 min, 2000, Allyson MitchellGlitter, 1 min, 2003 , Allyson Mitchell and Christina ZeidlerCup Cake, 3 min, 2008, Allyson MitchellIf Anyone Should Happen to Get In My Way, 3 min, 2003, Allyson Mitchell and Chris-tina ZeidlerPrecious Little Tiny Love, 3 min, 2003, Allyson MitchellCollection of the artist

PAYTON TURNER (American, b. 1986)The Lookout Circle Collection 2013Stickers and paper, installation variableCollection of the artist

KELLY WOOD (Canadian, b. 1962)Vancouver Cart No. 62 2011Inkjet print, 162 x 112 cmCollection of the artist

Vancouver Cart No. 31 2011Inkjet print, 162 x 112 cm

Notes1. Walter Benjamin. “Unpacking my Library: A Talk About Book Collecting.” In Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969, p. 60.2. Ibid.3. Annie Leonard. The Story of Stuff. Free Press: New York, 2011, p. 146.4. Germaine Koh in Kathleen Ritter. “Germaine Koh.” In How Soon is Now. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2009, p. 53.5. Sue Carter Flynn. “Allyson Mitchell Does Triple Duty at the Khyber, NeoCraft Conference and FemFest.” The Coast (November 22, 2007): www.thecoast.ca/halifax/allyson-mitchell-does-triple-duty-at-the-khyber-neocraft-conference-and-femfest/Content?oid=961731.6. Gail Steketee. “From Dante to DSM-V: A Short History of Hoarding.” International OCD Foundation, 2010: http://www.ocfoundation.org/hoarding/dante_to_dsm-v.aspx.7. George Eliot. Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003 (originally published 1878).8. Martin Hampton. Possessed. Published on Vimeo, 2008: http://www.possessed.me.uk/possessed_martin_hampton_home.html.9. Jeanne Arnold et. al. Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, 2012.10. Information on the Collyers comes from a number of primary newspaper sources and Randy Frost with Gail Steketee. Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010; Kenneth J. Weiss. “Hoarding, Hermitage, and the Law: Why We Love the Collyer Brothers.” Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online. 38.2 (2010), pp. 251-57.11. Carina Chocano. “Underneath Every Hoarder is a Normal Person Waiting to be Dug Out.” New York Times Magazine (June 17, 2011): http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/magazine/exploring-the-landscapes-of-other-peoples-trash.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=hoarding.12. Chocano, 2011. 13. Will Self. “Obsessive Repulsive.” New Statesman. May 2012: http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/lifestyle/2012/05/obsessive-repulsive.14. Frost, 2010, notes that in almost all cases of forced cleaning, the houses fill up again, often in as little as two weeks. 15. Amy Gutman. “My $10,000 Storage Unit Mistake.” Salon (September 12, 2011): http://www.salon.com/2011/09/13/storage_space_mistake/.16. Janis Jefferies, “Loving Attention: An Outburst of Craft in Contemporary Art.” In Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art, ed. Maria Elena Buszek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 225.17. Ernest Preeg. Traders in a Brave New World: The Uruguay Round and the Future of the International Trading System. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.18. Elizabeth L. Cline. Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. London: Portfolio, 2012.19. Luz Claudio. “Waste Couture: Environmental Impact of the Clothing Industry.” Environmental Health Perspectives 115, no. 9 (September 2007), online edition.20. Juliet B. Schor. “Prices and Quantities: Unsustainable Consumption and the Global Economy.” Ecological Economics 55 (2005), pp. 309-20.21. Claudio, 2007.22. Ibid.23. Gutman, 2011.24. Ibid.25. Scott Lash and Celia Lury. Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things. London: Polity Press, 2007.26. Jon Mooallem. “The Self-Storage Self.” New York Times Magazine. September 2, 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06self-storage-t.html?pagewanted=all.27. Mark Whitehouse. “Number of the Week.” Wall Street Journal (April 23, 2011): http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/04/23/number-of-the-week-americans-buy-more-stuff-they-dont-need/.28. Robert Frank. Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess. Toronto: Simon and Schuster, 2001, p. 5.29. Whitehouse, 2011.30. International Monetary Fund. World Economic Outlook: Coping with High Debt and Sluggish Growth. IMF, 2012.

Biographies

Shannon Gerard is writer illustrator and publisher. Her work takes a variety of forms including on-line comics, periodical illustrations, trade-paperback graphic fiction, and self-published artist’s books and multiples. Thematically she is very curious about issues such as magic, hope, faith and human frailty. She also produces large-scale installations that incorporate stop-motion animations and digital print, and spends at least 50% of her waking life crocheting soft sculptures. Publications in progress include Things They Gave Us, a collaborative print-based work about paternity, and Blood & Thunder, a multi-disciplinary project about her father’s childhood as the son of itinerant puppeteers. Her work has been shown numerous times in Toronto, Chicago, New York, and Montreal. Gerard is an Assistant Professor in the Publications Specialization at OCAD University.

Germaine Koh is a Canadian visual artist based in Vancouver. Her conceptually-generated work is concerned with the significance of everyday actions, familiar objects and common places. Her exhibition history includes the BALTIC Centre (Newcastle), De Appel (Amsterdam), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Para/Site Art Space (Hong Kong), Frankfurter Kunstverein, Bloomberg SPACE (London), The Power Plant (Toronto), Seoul Museum of Art, Artspace (Sydney), The British Museum (London), the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Plug In ICA (Winnipeg), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), and the Liverpool, Sydney and Montréal biennials. Koh was a recipient of the 2010 VIVA Award, and a finalist for the 2004 Sobey Art Award. Formerly an Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Canada, she is also an independent curator and partner in the independent record label weewerk.

Allyson Mitchell is a maximalist artist working predominantly in sculpture, installation and film. Since 1997, Mitchell has been melding feminism and pop culture to play with contemporary ideas about sexuality, autobiography, and the body, largely through the use of reclaimed textile and abandoned craft. Her work has exhibited in galleries and festivals across Canada, the US, Europe and East Asia. She has also performed extensively with Pretty Porky and Pissed Off, a fat performance troupe, as well as publishing both writing and music. She is an Assistant Professor in the School of Women’s Studies at York University. Allyson Mitchell’s work has been generously supported by the Chalmers Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario and Toronto Arts Councils and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Collection of the artist

Vancouver Cart No. 7 2010Inkjet print, 162 x 112 cmCollection of the artist

Payton Cosell Turner is a Brooklyn-based artist. She graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2008, and has since founded Flat Vernacular with her partner Brain Kaspr. Flat Vernacular is a Brooklyn-based design company that specializes in original hand-drawn, hand-printed, and bespoke wallpapers. Turner’s work has been featured in numerous publications, including New York Times, Elle Decor, W Magazine, T Magazine and Swiss Miss, among others.

Kirsty Robertson is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Museum Studies in the Department of Visual Arts at Western. Her research focuses on activism, visual culture, and changing economies. She has published widely on the topic and is currently finishing her book Tear Gas Epiphanies: New Economies of Protest, Vision, and Culture in Canada. More recently, she has turned her attention to the study of wearable technologies, immersive environments, and the potential overlap(s) between textiles and technologies. She considers these issues within the framework of globalization, activism, and burgeoning ‘creative economies.’ Her co-edited volume, Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture, and Activism in Canada, was released in 2011.

Kelly Wood is a photographer and practicing artist whose research focuses on subjects that relate to the environmental impact of waste accumulation, waste economies, and all forms of visible and invisible pollution. As an art practitioner and educator, she has a commitment to analogue and digital photography and contemporary art and art theory. Her photography has been broadly exhibited in Canada at the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; the Art Gallery of Ontario; The Power Plant; the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; the Vancouver Art Gallery; and the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery. Her work has been shown internationally at the Akademie der Kuenste, Berlin; Museum Van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp; Fotoinstituut, Rotterdam; and Artspace in Sydney, Australia. She has a strong interest in the “Vancouver School” and photography in general, and has previously written about Jeff Wall and Stan Douglas for international publications.

Acknowledgments

I would like to start by thanking the yarn bombers. This thank you includes the students in VAH2235F (What Not to Wear): Fashion, Textiles and Art who knitted the first batch of squares, Julia Krueger who was the teaching assistant for that class, and her friends Mary McIntyre, Ann Dayes and Hanna Marti who helped teach the students how to knit. A thank you is also extended to the many, many people at Western and in London who responded to the call for squares and sent in hundreds.

At the McIntosh, my thanks extends to Catherine Elliot Shaw and James Patten who saw this exhibition through from idea to its final stage. It was a pleasure to work with you both. Thank you also to Brian Lambert for his always-expert installation and his calm demeanour, and to Natalie Finkelstein for keeping the exhibition in the hearts and minds of the public at large.

The artists obviously made the exhibition what it was. But they were also generous with their time and with working through the idea of the exhibition. It was fun, engaging and and stimulating to work with you all.

I’d also like to thank the Department of Visual Arts at UWO for their continued support and for hosting the Clutter(ed) symposium and undergraduate exhibition, which took place alongside Secret Stash.

Finally, I would like to thank Stephanie Anderson and Kristyn Rolanty, the two research assistants on the project. Stephanie and Kristyn worked tirelessly folding catalogue covers, sewing squares together and spending hours stickering the wallpaper installation. This exhibition simply would not have been possible without the two of them.

Secret Stash: Accumulation, Hoarding and the Love of StuffFebruary 28 to April 6, 2013

Curated by Kirsty RobertsonDepartment of Visual ArtsWestern University, Canada

Published by McIntosh Gallery, London, OntarioImages courtesy of Shannon GerardDesigned by Shannon Gerard and Kirsty Robertson