Home Stories

Hoard

  • Series
Colourful digital collage. In the foreground is a black and white photograph cut-out of an elderly woman looking downwards. A bobby pin pulls back the grey hair around her right ear. She is wearing a flowery embroidered shawl. Behind the elderly woman and within her eye line is a black and white cut out of a three story toy dollhouse. The walls and roof of one side of the dollhouse have been removed, exposing the interior of the house. Inside the dollhouse in the different rooms there are many small, colourful cut outs of household objects and furniture, including an alarm clock, wooden chests of drawers, filled cardboard boxes, piles of books and bed sheets. The objects are stacked on top of each other messily, forming many piles. The background is a photograph of a red and white floral print.
A Doll's House. © The Collage Graduate for Wellcome Collection.

Georgie Evans’s weekly visits to her grandma’s means she knows what never throwing anything away looks like. The small bungalow got fuller and fuller as Grandma collected more and more things. But when does a desire to hold on to objects, and to endlessly gather more, become a problem? And why are some people celebrated as collectors while others are dismissed as hoarders? In this series, Georgie attempts to understand why her grandma needed to surround herself with so much stuff, and why hoarding behaviour can be difficult to define and discuss.