What: To Have & To Hold
Where and when: Objectspace, 8 Ponsonby Rd, to December 19
Gallery talks: Making Collections floor talk with curator Philip Clarke, today at 2pm; panel discussion on the relationship between private collectors and public museums, with Philip Clarke, Warwick Freeman, Rosemary McLeod, Justine Olsen, Laura Vodanovich, October 29 at 7.30pm.
Just because I've got too many jugs in the cupboards but keep picking them up in second-hand shops anyway, does that make me a collector? I don't think so, not after visiting the new show at Objectspace. A motley lot of old jugs is nothing compared to the 18 collections housed in separate cabinets for the gallery's To Have & To Hold exhibition.
Each collection offers an insight into a person's life - or, in one poignant case, a marriage. A Sentimental Collection, courtesy of the "MaryAnn Crick and Tim Crick Collections", is a series of subtly hued Royal Copenhagen porcelain figures. The collection started in the early 1950s when Tony Crick, a doctor, gave his wife MaryAnn, a nurse, a Royal Copenhagen ornament on each of her birthdays, always a bird or an animal. But the final gift, from 1966, is a porcelain nurse, signifying MaryAnn, caring for her dying husband.
Curator Philip Clarke believes collectors are motivated by three central ideas: biography, history and pleasure. The Collection of Fashionability, 26 pairs of high-end sunglasses accumulated by Rosie Schneideman over the past 40 years, is a biography, says Clarke, "a record of this woman's shopping, her engagement with design".
"Here you have high-level consumption - Dior, Prada, Gucci - but she's got quite a fastidious approach, you might even call it an old-fashioned approach, to buying and wearing. She thinks of these things as design objects and she has never thrown away a pair of sunglasses since 1970. She doesn't go back to them once she has stopped wearing them but she doesn't throw them away. A lot of consumers throw stuff away. So that is what I call one aspect of biography."
Grant Stevens' Collection of Devotion may be a homage to his hero Winston Churchill, but the objects in the cabinet - a recording of his speeches, a book called The Wisdom of Winston Churchill, a photo, a toby jug, medals and stamps - were all bought on the internet within one month. Shopping via the internet has changed the nature of collecting - but not for everyone.
"Some people spend a lifetime going to auction houses and antique shops so the whole pattern of their lives in some ways is structured around that," explains Clarke, going on later to say that collectors have a "sense - a twitch of the nose".
Anyone who has visited John Perry's Helensville treasure trove Global Village Antiques knows this is a man who has spent a lifetime immersed in collecting. At Objectspace, his cabinet is filled with an estimated 500 objects including the book that has inspired the display's title: A Short History of the World, with apologies to H.G. Wells. Old encyclopaedias are the building blocks for this collection - The Universal History of the World, Earliest Times, The World of Wonder, History Today. But it took a while for Perry and Clarke to work out where - or how - to start.
"When I went and visited John, he is very articulate about these things," recalls Clarke. "I knew about the scale and range of his collection and we had a lot of trouble making some sense. 'What is the frame here? It's just so bloody enormous.' Then he was called to the phone and I looked around the room and realised there were all these sets of encyclopaedias and realised this was the clue.
"So he has used the encyclopaedias as the stands for all of these things. I guess what he is saying is that in his view, all things are related."
Perry is a collector of history, along with ceramics buff Geoff Perkins, also in the show with a cabinet full of works by important ceramic artists. His collection at home numbers more than 2000 items. Space may also be an issue for Stephen Rainbow, whose collection of 25 British Ford cars is mirrored in a display cabinet full of toy models of the very same cars. "He is motivated by a sense of history," says Clarke. "They are very unglamorous vehicles but very reliable. They don't have a great monetary value, they might have been headed for the scrapheap but he saves them and drives them. Sometimes I see him sailing down the road in his little Ford Cortina."
To Have & To Hold also includes displays by retired Auckland Museum curator Mick Prendergrast's tiki-inspired objects, collected "a long time before debates about cultural appropriation"; an anonymous collection of mourning jewellery and another one of antique items (boxes, combs, walking sticks) made of shell, lacquer and bone; hankies from Rosemary McLeod's textile collection; a gruesome range of birth control utensils collected by Family Planning veteran Dr Margaret Sparrow; contemporary lei, courtesy of Louis Le Vaillant; delicate children's knitwear, from Judy and Monique Redmond; Michael Hodgson's robot toys; Fiona Thompson's collection of wooden spoons by Levi Borgstom; contemporary jewellery collected by Jillian de Beer; and an impressive display of secateurs lining one of the gallery walls, gathered over the years by professional gardener Martin Keay.
Clarke himself says he's not so much a collector as a "magpie" - but he would dearly like to get his hands on an antique Stilton cheese spoon to add to his array of spoons. Sounds like a collector to me.
