What We Choose to Keep
On collecting the ordinary evidence of a life.
I have a fondness for things other people might throw away.
Old photographs of people I never knew. Handwritten grocery lists. Pages torn from forgotten books. Ticket stubs, receipts, faded postcards, scraps of paper with someone else's handwriting.
I collect these things because they interest me. Because they have stories, even when I don't know what those stories are. Or who those stories belong to.
And because I believe ordinary life is material.
Recently, while making a series of small collages, I found myself working with old photographs of unfamiliar people in unfamiliar places. A woman standing beside a man beneath the trees. A group of women gathered on someone's front steps. A little boat on a quiet stretch of water.
I don't know their names. I don't know what happened before or after those photographs were taken.
But someone thought those moments were worth remembering.
Someone lifted a camera, framed a scene, and pressed the shutter.
And now, all these years later, here I am, giving those moments another place to live.
I've been thinking about what we choose to keep.
We save the obvious things, of course. Wedding photographs. Birthday cards. Letters from people we love. Souvenirs from extraordinary journeys.
But what about the ordinary things?
The receipt from a particularly lovely afternoon. A leaf picked up on a morning walk. The color of the sky just before dinner. A sentence overheard in a coffee shop.
These are the small pieces of evidence that tell the story of a life being lived.
Not necessarily the remarkable life. Not the carefully curated life.
Our actual, ordinary, wonderfully particular lives.
And perhaps that's what interests me most about collecting.
It asks us to pay attention before we know whether something matters.
To notice the color, the conversation, the curious little detail. To gather what catches our attention. And, sometimes, to make something from it.
Not everything needs to be saved. Not everything needs to become art.
But there's something lovely about living with the possibility that an ordinary Tuesday might contain something worth keeping.
That's the idea behind Collect Your Life, the creative practice I've been building around noticing, collecting, and making.
It isn't about having an interesting life.
It's about becoming interested in the life you already have.
And discovering, along the way, how much there is to keep.
Ordinary life is material.
