Introduction to Accidental Collectors, an exhibition curated by Daniel Charny for the Aram Gallery.

Phil McNally, a friend I was at college with, became interested in three dimensional photography and started experimenting by sawing up and re-configuring 35mm camera bodies to make twin lens-ed cameras. After some early, crude but successful experiments, he became a member of the Stereoscopic Society, a society whose ‘objectives are to foster the practice, enjoyment and advancement of all forms of stereoscopy, or, pictures in three dimensions’.
Quite similar to the type of collectors clubs that grow around shared enthusiasms for particular types of objects, it consisted of very keen and mostly amateur photographers with a particular bent for stereo photography. One of the members though, who I met through Phil, was Tony Hayward.
Tony is primarily an artist, who, when making art, does so with a kind of typical observation and thinking of an artist, but the precision of a model maker, and also the care and sensitivity of a craftsperson.
Knowing Tony’s work, I can see why he ends up with accidental collections of things, they are not really collections so much, more a kind of rich, material research resource. One of these ‘research resources’ consisted of Viewmaster 3D slide viewers, collected from a number of different sources and countries. Phil wanted to start taking photos for use with a Viewmaster and hence, went to see Tony to find out more about how it all worked. At that meeting it became apparent that Tony also had several other collections; mostly hand made, recycled objects made in the roadside workshops of India, where he travels a lot, and makes some of his work. I remember that Tony had, for instance, gathered several boxes full of bicycle / scooter mud flaps, made from cut up bits of car inner tubes, which were then painted with a variety of different logos, and symbols.
It seems that his interest in things, like many other accidental collectors, goes beyond the thing itself, and is situated more in the context and culture of where it is made and the techniques and ingenuity used to manufacture it. I think it is probably these kind of concerns that make accidental collectors out of many artists and designers.
Most of the furniture designers I know, for instance, have gathered without planning, an odd group of chairs in their lives, and rarely have a matching set around a table. A quick glance now around our studio, I can count more than fifteen different chairs by more than a dozen different designers, and manufactured from; solid wood, fibreglass, tubular steel, glass filled polypropylene, die cast aluminium, formed plywood, injection moulded abs, steam bent beech, and then others still, using combinations of these and other materials and processes. I have never considered these chairs a collection, more that they are the result of an occupational hazard of being a furniture designer.
There is an inherent problem though, with gathering things like chairs, useful as they are and for more than just sitting on, they take up quite a bit of space and can just get in the way. Despite lack of space however, I’m unlikely, to pass up the opportunity of an interesting chair find, and will cycle across London with it precariously strapped to myself or bicycle, or find ways of bringing them home via air travel.

Paul Elliman, artist and graphic designer, whilst walking the kids to school might notice a small piece of metal which has fallen off some passing vehicle and been run over by proceeding ones and eventually ended up in the gutter. To him it’s got potential, as a perfect ‘f’ or ‘w’. It might seem interesting to the kids too, but a passer by might consider him a bit off kilter?

This intrinsic quality that is part of so many people who make things, to the ‘normal’ world might seem strange? Regular collectors are anyway often considered a bit ‘outsider’; typically, people in anoraks, standing for perhaps, hours on end, on freezing winter days, at the end of railway platforms in the hope that they might catch a rare set of train numbers.
At least regular collecting is an understood and accepted activity; most people as kids collected something or other: stamps, fossils, football stickers? But how are people like this, who aren’t even proper ‘collectors’, considered outside of their circle?

Perhaps this exhibition has an important part to play in recognising the intrigue and importance of unconventional types of collections and their reasons and methods, and offers an insight into how these accidents occur.
The same passer-by who might have looked oddly at Paul Elliman rescuing a piece of rusty metal at the side of the road, on visiting this exhibition, might suddenly understand why, and perhaps look differently at the accidental collecting methods of others?

(2007)