Mudlarks & Connoisseurs : Barry McGlashan
It seems apt that I’ve been making paintings about collecting this year, as it marks 20 years since graduating into the wonderful, curious and challenging world of art. Without collectors I wouldn’t be here, writing this now. But to say this exhibition is purely about the act of collecting isn’t quite right; it’s really about why we need to collect and the fascinating ways we go about it.
Recently I found myself sitting in my studio, the desk and floor strewn with sheets of paper as ever - handwritten lists of paintings for an upcoming show. I was in the habit of making repeated lists of work titles as I got towards my deadline. These lists weren’t really of any practical use and yet if I made an error in the writing I tended to start again from scratch, to have the ‘complete’ list. Was this just a way of holding all the information together correctly or was something else going on? I realised I was trying to exert a form of control over the complicated business of making a show. An exhibition needs to be like a well oiled machine – all the parts need to align at the right time so that the machine can run smoothly. The creation of this exhibition itself demonstrated the sort of obsessive behaviour that characterises many forms of collecting: from the gathering of ideas, to the precise layering of marks on the picture surface, to the collation of the final body of work. According to the philosopher Umberto Eco ‘we like lists because we don’t want to die’ and it is this eternal human pursuit of permanence through collecting, recording and collation – and all the adventure which that entails – that lies at the heart of this latest exhibition.
The drive to collect has not only shaped the history of art – something which continues to inform my work – it has also been an influential factor in many major historical events. When those first early explorers returned from the New World, it was the myriad wonders they had collected, catalogued and preserved on their travels which proved inspirational to traders, colonisers, scientists and idealists alike. Of course, at its worst, collecting could inadvertantly lead to the frenzied, speculative greed of Tulipmania in seventeenth century Holland, an hysteria that only aided the spread of bubonic plague, nonetheless, such events still form part of the collecting story. Such stories form the starting point for my work*. I love finding those tales which have been largely overlooked, gaps in our visual culture waiting to be filled that not only talk of our past, but also think of our present and look to our future. They allow me to go deeper into the history, imagine the scenes and make the paintings.
I hope that this exhibition talks to all those Mudlarks and Connoisseurs who share the need to pursue, to collect, and who in doing so find their own meaning.
