the art of art

vic, design student in sydney australia.

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frugal living is hoarding containers and turning them into life hacks

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Dollhoard, 2016 Found objects 53.3 x 60.2 x 30.3 cm

> details > concept statement

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Details of Dollhoard click to view enlarged images in photoset

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Concept Statement

Title: Dollhoard Artist: Victoria Wang

Dollhoard. A dollhouse. Turned into a hoard.

To document an aspect of my personal life, I have created Dollhoard to reflect the current state of my house and myself as a compulsive hoarder. I have approached it in a way that I call ‘sculptural scrapbooking’, which involves documenting your personal history by assembling memorabilia into sculptures.

Dollhoard was assembled entirely out of objects that I have hoarded over the past years since childhood. The wooden dollhouse, approximately half a metre in both height and width, was salvaged from the side of the road, and filled with an assortment of items that were carefully arranged through a series of experimentations to look balanced yet chaotically crowded. The typical person would presumably see it as a collection of junk but, to a compulsive hoarder like me, everything is valuable and will be of use later if not now. While things like broken jewellery may be hung onto for sentimental value, I also cling onto plastic cutlery, used toilet rolls, fallen drawer knobs, empty containers and severed wires because of their potential utility.

A primary influence for this piece was Song Dong’s Waste Not (2006), an exhibition displaying over 10,000 objects hoarded by the artist’s late mother in response to poverty. I found great resonance with this work because my behaviour was also developed from poverty, and my mother and her mother are hoarders as well. It is particularly sorrowful to think about the common roots of compulsive hoarding because despite the hardships and debilitating anxiety, hoarders are ridiculed. TV series like Hoarders (2009) and Hoarding: Buried Alive (2010) turn hoarders into spectacles who are viewed with a gross fascination that is inherently dehumanising.

The creation of Dollhoard is an attempt at collapsing the social distance between ‘hoarder’ and ‘human’, ‘disabled person’ and ‘person’. Through this sculptural scrapbook, I speak out as a hoarder to say that we are still people and we deserve respect. This is another one of my pieces that deal with mental health stigma; my previous works have explored depression and anxiety, suicidal ideation, and borderline personality disorder, with one on post-traumatic stress disorder currently in progress.

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I showed Dollhoard to my older sister and told her that it was a representation of our house. She said it’s disgusting but also very accurate and I pretty much captured the essence.

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Inspiration: Hoarding shows such as Hoarders (2009) and Hoarding: Buried Alive (2010), what they mean, and their impacts

Compulsive hoarders struggle with anxiety that is often caused by or influenced by stressful circumstances such as poverty, to the point where they need to accumulate anything potentially useful and that discarding anything would be painful and almost impossible. (source)

I have been thinking about TV series about extreme, compulsive hoarders and how dehumanising they are. These TV series turn them into mere spectacles for typical people to see how ‘fascinating’ living in a hoard environment is, and it is about distancing themselves from disabled people and viewing them as strange and dirty subhumans.

It hardly matters that the shows address compulsive hoarding as an illness, because in the end it is more about the transformation from the ‘before’ and ‘after’, how nice and clean it looks, how inspirational it is, and how it was achieved because there are filthy, disabled people who exist. In other words, compulsive hoarders are used as examples of how ‘disgusting’ people can be.

I chose to create Dollhoard to try to collapse the distance between ‘hoarder’ and ‘human’ created by these shows and societal conventions in general. People often ridicule me for being stingy, using things sparingly, picking up random ‘junk’ and obsessively collecting plastic cutlery, but are oblivious or ignorant to the fact that some people act like this and that perhaps some significant personal history may have caused this type of behaviour.

There are some areas in my house that look similar to the image below (source). I cannot post pictures of my house due to privacy reasons. Things like this are real and yet people don’t care to acknowledge that it is.

There is A LOT MORE media on compulsive hoarding, listed here on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding#Society_and_culture.

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Process/experiment: Reflection + naming the artwork

My artwork is about hoarding, a habit that I see as a way of functioning in life but to others, a dysfunction. My mother and I hoard a lot of things and has basically turned our house into a junkyard, so I wanted to document this in a creative way by producing a metaphor with a dollhouse filled with the things I’ve hoarded. I think I’ll refer to this as sculptural scrapbooking.

I tried to apply this concept to the process of naming the work by playing with the word ‘dollhouse’ while trying to incorporate the word ‘hoard’ or anything synonymous to it.

Dollhouse --> Dumphouse: a play on words by using the same capital letter. BUT OF COURSE I had to check if there is already an existing meaning associated with it because it does have some sort of disgusting connotation to it, and I found out that on Urban Dictionary it means, “ A place full of men that brings back a woman and passes them around sexually from person to person.” Yuck. So goodbye to this name. (source)

Dollhouse --> Dollhoard: a transformation of a house into a hoard. Both begin with the letter ‘H’. It sounds like I am talking about a hoard of dolls, but I think I will go along with it anyway because I like the idea of the transformation, which is exactly what the work is about.

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Process/experiment: Photo for submission

I took a few photos and selected 3 pictures that I considered for final submission. These two images here are the ones I have decided not to use, and I will post the other one when I submit it.

The first one is a shot of the dollhouse in my room, displayed on the table. It kinda looks like the shelf next to it, which is filled with my sister’s figurines. I wasn’t sure if I should use this photo because it was less about the artwork and more about how it’s sitting in my room and what that would look like.

The second one is of the dollhouse, more in focus and front-on. I decided not to use this because it makes the house look too flat and awkward. From this, I decided to take a picture of the dollhouse slightly from the side, and that picture will be used in my submission as it gives it a more 3D effect.

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As the dollhouse is displayed in my room without any additional lighting equipment, there is a shadow cast in the dollhouse that hides the details in the back of the rooms.

To clearly show how the objects have been set up in the rooms, I have used flash on my camera to take these pictures.

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Process/experiment: Leaking out

The dollhouse has holes on the side and as I was arranging the objects inside, I allowed some of them to spill out through the hole, mostly because some of them couldn’t really fit perfectly inside the house. This turned out to be an effective way of communicating a sense of crowdedness so I kept it.

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Process: Completed but not completed arrangement

I thought I finished arranging everything nicely so I took pictures of the dollhouse for submission. However, I realised that the cork in the brown/white room fell off the drawer knob, so I had to fix it and take new pictures. Everything else seems to be ok though.

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Week 12: Chance

The second class activity was about deconstructing something and rearranging it in a different way.

My group ripped strips of paper from various magazines and taped them together to make a quilt of sorts. The design looks different on both sides.

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Week 12: Chance

Our class task was to make a random generation ‘machine’, a generator that can lead you to something unknown.

My generator is a tall glass is filled with pieces of cardboard that each have a word written on it, these being 'adjective', 'noun', 'adverb' or 'verb'.  To use this 'machine', you will have to take the tall glass (that is filled with the paper bits) and roughly pour and shake it over the top of the two wine glass. Whichever ones fall into the glass, you take out to read. These words will assist you in making decisions in artmaking or just to do something random. For each piece of paper, you will have to spontaneously come up with a word that belongs to the given category. After you have done this, you will have to proceed by attempting to create something that involves the actions and nouns in some way.

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Honorable mentions of my hoard:

Portable TV parts from my assessment 1, which I have been recycling in other works such as those done for our class activities

My plastic cutlery collection, which I proudly display on my door. Unfortunately some are hard to see because they are transparent.

I will be incorporating some of their elements in my final work.

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Experiment: Arranging the objects in their rooms

Arranging the objects was more about seeing what works and trying out different ways of how things fit with each other.

I ended up with a blue room, which is very aesthetically pleasing. The others were still in the process but the toilet paper roll room kinda turned into a white/brown one and the bottom room is very large so it was more random. It looks a bit strange due to the flash used for the photos but I had to use it because without it, it was a bit too dark to see all the details.

I quite like the colour-coordinated organisation that emerged from my experimentation, and I look forward to the end result.

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Experiment: Bubble wrap on roof

I tried putting some bubble wrap (a special one with extra big bubbles) but was a bit unsure if I should go along with it. Leaving it here for future reference.

Edit: I decided not to incorporate this element in the final artwork as I preferred to keep most of the hoard inside the house itself.

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Process/experiments: Displaying tiny bits

This is a tray filled with tiny, miscellaneous things which are often bits that have broken off of things. I started this tray when I was around 7, and I still put things in it to this day. A lot of the things in here are so random that my head hurts just from trying to name or comprehend what they are, but despite that I cannot bear to throw any of it away.

I wanted to showcase these in the dollhouse but I didn’t want to scatter them around, so I tried using containers. I transferred most of the little bits into a glass cup that I took from uni (the one our tutor Peter gave me in week 7 when we were finding materials to make a piece on ‘perceptions’), and the end result was fantastic so I decided to keep it.