Psychologies and Spaces of Accumulation: The hoard as collagist methodology (and other stories)

Taking hoarding as a model for amassing materials within art practice, this research questions the borders of a productive or rational relationship to collation and the development of pathology.

In practice, I focus on how materials can be manipulated to reflect or imply attachments and value systems within disorder, collection and their interpretations/ analyses. Using historical examples, I question how disorder is formed, spatially, aesthetically and through clinical record-keeping, making specific reference to written/visual case-studies from Charcot and Freud. I question whether disorder can ever be seen as a culturally produced phenomenon in parallel to its clinical counterpart and suggest its uses to knowledge production within the fields of Fine Art and critical theory.

I suggest hoarding – and the cultural construction of disorder - as collagist and create works, which reflect on the borders of psychopathological attachments to ‘stuff’; psychologies inherent to accumulation; and conscious and unconscious spaces occupied by both object and analysis. Creating new collagist and fictive methodologies out of the construction of case histories, and through the cooption of diagnostic tools and narratology used in psychoanalysis, I write about the work and within the work.

This research questions how psychological disorder is re-narrated through fictive and visual forms within culture and via collective understandings of psychoanalytic subjectivities. I suggest how these fictions connect, accumulate and reflect back on themselves, affecting research and crossovers within psychoanalytic, spatial and cultural fields. I make links between the modern city and psychological disorder, drawing on the psychical affects of changes in urban space.

Examining collation, the construction of psychological spaces and temporality in art practice (from Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau to Michael Landy’s Break Down and Tomoko Takahashi’s collation of objects) alongside new clinical research into Hoarding Disorder, I relate compulsion and space to a rationalisation of clutter in contemporary practice.