Karen Golland

Collecting has always come naturally to me. It started with a spool of thread nicked from Grace Bros. By the end of kindergarten, I had an impressive stash of coloured leads from broken pencils. At some point, I started collecting dead people’s things. Families gifted stuff to me when their loved ones died. They couldn’t keep it but also couldn’t throw it out. When my loved ones started dying, I collected their things. Collections in my care multiply and take up more space. They are photographed, drawn, written about, replicated, and transformed anew. With each alteration, they say something else. My art practice combines textiles, assemblage, collage, and site-specific installation to explore this human desire to accumulate. I am interested in how the meaning of these collections slip and change, dependent on context and how they are ordered or disordered.

Things come and go; it is in their nature. As Karen Golland’s partner was dying, she began binding threads to make pom-poms. Grief wound its way into new acts of creation; the process allowing those close to share their own loss. This accumulation became ‘the nature of things’.