I established my first collection when I was five years old. Based on an ad-hoc archaeology of the vegetable patch, I gathered the various bits and pieces that were frequently unearthed and assembled them in my display that was housed in a large hole in a neighbouring wall. Broken bits of glass and earthenware; bottles of various shapes and sizes; rusted remnants of tools and ironmongery. All these I cleaned up and assembled in varying order of materials and imagined themes.

Apart from a small bronze aeroplane, which I regarded as the jewel of my collection, I placed equal importance on everything that I found. The mere fact of their age superseded any notion of true historical value- they all represented the past but yielded nothing more than that they had been thrown away at roughly the same time

At the heart of the collection lies the object, without objects, there is no collection. By the same token, without an individual going out and accumulating said objects and bringing them together in some manner, there is no collection.

Thus we establish that it is the relationship between individual and artefact that allows a collection to be. The nature of the collection and the motivation behind its existence are as varied as its multitudinous manifestations throughout history.

The object has its own direct history, the time and manner of its production and the function that it fulfilled, when removed from its rightful context it becomes a referent to that place. In possessing and recontextualising the object, the collector imbues himself with a link to another time or geographical location.

The prestige of such associations is roughly proportional to the distance that the object has from its origins. Such distance can be measured by both physical and temporal means but also through the rarity of the object with regards to others of the same type.

When dealing with historical, scientific and anthropological artefacts, the ability for objects to supersede each other in value terms is generally a result of their uniqueness; the art object has also to deal with issues of fashion and, above all, taste. It is necessary at this point to suggest that it is the contemporary art object that is being dealt with here, for as soon artists die and can no longer produce new work, their canon is subject to the historical reappraisal and commodification which distorts the reasons for their accumulation by any individual or institution.

The artist has a strange relationship to the collection. In one sense, the artist is a collector; amassing and collating materials, objects, images, experiences even and recapitulating or emphasising them in another form. In this regard, the artist/collector willingly partakes in the adoption and recontextualising of the collected objects, to a greater or lesser degree manipulating their referent values, in order to construct something entirely new.

Apart from a few instances and in general terms, the artist is not a collector; the artist makes work that can be consumed, bought and possessed by another thus resulting in it being a focus for collection.

In the end, the collection becomes more important than the objects that constitute it. The uniqueness of individual artefacts are occasionally highlighted; the Dali of the Kelvingrove; the Rembrandt of the Burrell; the bronze plane that I gave pride of place to on my wall, these become mere fillips and accents to a conglomeration of things that are homogenised by their co-existing in the same space with a common narrative tying them all together; the biography and legacy of the collector who acquired them.

©Sam Stead 2008