I recently came across this book which helped to bring together some of the ideas I’ve been thinking and reading about. It’s also helped me to set some parameters on what I am making as The Everyday is very broad and I got to a point a few months ago where I felt I needed to narrow things down a bit.
Boscagli, M 2014, Stuff Theory: Everyday Object, Radial Materialism, Bloomsbury, New York
Stuff is defined in this book as things that are ex-commodities but through their use or encounter with humans (objects that are broken, worn or outdated) they no longer sit neatly within or hold value in the capitalist system. On the other hand they are also not quite rubbish. For example, the things that fill our cupboards, draws and pockets. Things we don’t really use or need but that we can’t quite get rid of. I’ve been thinking about how Jewellery can be this type of object. It can be so important to us but can so often sit in boxes collecting dust.
There is a need to look deeply into our relationships with our things. We can, especially those of us who are lucky enough to be able to have a lot of stuff, feel overwhelmed by it. On the other hand we live in a culture of ‘never enough’ and wanting more, a need for continual progress and renewal. Stuff Theory criticises this mode of being and brings up questions around consumption and the environment without disregarding the significance of material culture, and our often important and intimate relationships with our stuff. Therefore, it is neither for or against stuff. Rather it sees it as important to study stuff in order to reimagine subject-object relations and our current way of organising the world.
Stuff, in Stuff Theory, sits outside of or on the borders of categorisation in the current system and it’s position is precarious (these things could easily become rubbish or hold value again as a sought after second hand item). The idea of things sitting on the borders of categorisation really interests me and links back to ideas I talked about in an earlier blog post around ‘the familiar’ and pushing things to the ‘just familiar’. I’ve been combining elements of familiar things to then create something that is less so. A kind of hybrid familiarity that hopefully also, in some senses, sits precariously between categories. For one person it perhaps resembles one thing and for another is it something else.
Photo: Stuff (ongoing series), 2020, brooches and objects, materials: copper, mild steel, stainless steel, found electrical wire, found aluminium bottles, found copper plumbing pipe, brass, vitreous enamel, mattress foam, epoxy clay, furniture paint, furniture wax. Dimensions smallest 2cm x 3cm x .6cm, largest 7.5cm x 5.5cm x 1.5cm.
I’m aware of the contradictions. I am, in a way, questioning our relationship with stuff while I’m also making more of it. Where I can, I’m trying to use materials I’ve found or scraps from past work. I’m thinking a lot about how the materials have a past and how this comes into the new object. How materials hold memories and can connect, past, present, people, and place. This brings the project back to ideas around an interconnectedness in everyday life.
Finally, Jewellery seems to encompasses a lot of the ideas I am thinking about: It sits on this border of public and private, interior and exterior that makes up everyday life. It is an everyday object in itself and hence connects us to the everyday and our environment. It also often exists as ‘stuff’ and it creates physical encounter between object and the body. These are all things that I’m thinking about in my practice at the moment.