Accumulation

I have been going through the stuff that I have gathered around me over the years, trying to make decisions about what to keep, what to toss. Through this, I have found many collections of objects, envelopes of cancelled stamps, postcards... letters... and art work form thirty years. There are three classes of stuff:1. the things that I have selected or gathered in a conscious way, collecting, sorting, displaying 2. the bodies of work that I have produced around various central ideas 3. things that have fallen into my space and have lingered, pasted to the layers of other more important things, like bills, papers from school... garbage

This third class of objects seems to have laziness, indecisiveness or mental instability at the core. When I come home from work, I am too tired to SEE what is important and what is just garbage. I have a GOOD day once in a while, when I can go through a box of mail, papers from my teaching and dig into the work for Goddard. It is somewhat over whelming. There seems to be no end of it.
Recognising what is important is a large part of my art practice. I can see patterns arise from numbers of things.
The comfort I find in collecting and sorting is a way of ordering my section of the world. In this way, there is an order, a class of ideas and a variety of forms, the accumulation of a number of things coming together to form the relationship of things. Usually, my work is done in series of hundreds of things, drawings and models of eggs, shells, heads, figures. To me there is a sense that in quantifying objects, there is a point where the one is lost and the many becomes the one... How this comforts me, I am not sure. I notice that I have a break point whereI lose interest in the relationships of objects or people in the numbers. One, a couple, a few, a small groups, I am able to make up stories about various numbers of people, but at some point, the crowd story has a much different quality, it becomes a mob, a demonstration, something very abstract. In meditation, this is a welcome experience, but during a demonstartion or a march, it can be quite frightening.