The Power of Collections to Create Place

Abstract

This exegesis is an account of how an artist can build a sense of place or a sense of belonging to a particular place through their art-making process. Specifically, it examines how collections or taxonomies have assisted me to understand my sense of belonging, as a native of Colombia dislocated to Australia, in the face of an increasingly dislocated and hybridised world. In arguing that collections make manifest the complex emotional connections people forge with the places they inhabit, I first examine the notion of place. Then I discuss how collections can become dwellings for experiences and memories, and how people also ‘dwell’ in their collections. Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of space offers a framework to reflect on the tensions between the intimacy of a newly developed sense of home, and the hybrid and foreign public places through which one has to go, and in which one has to dwell after geographical dislocation. Examining how contemporary artists who use collections or taxonomies in their work represent ideas of place, and how the concept of place exists through those collections I present my own ‘collection of collectors’ whose works have informed my studio practice. I conclude by reflecting on the bodies of work that I produced over the course of my research project, and analyse how successful they were in conveying ideas of place and the place-making process.