Hoard

Serial

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.

A woman in her wilderness of things

Even though her home was overwhelmed with stuff, Georgie Evans’s grandma couldn’t stop buying things. In this series, Georgie delves into hoarding, and attempts to make sense of her grandma’s behaviour.

The fine line between collecting and hoarding

Being ‘a collector’ is often celebrated but being labelled ‘a hoarder’ can be humiliating, at best. Georgie Evans asks what makes one set of objects a collection and another a hoard.

The trouble with too many things

Hoarding is a slippery subject – difficult to define or diagnose. As she tries to explain the intensity of her grandma’s collecting, Georgie Evans finds the words and tools at her disposal aren’t all that helpful.

Where hoarding and dementia meet

As Grandma’s dementia advanced, the things she’d amassed became more important: they consoled her. Clearing safe walkways through the piles became the first – though unwelcome – compromise.

Seeking the hoarder in literature

As she strives to deepen her understanding of hoarding, Georgie Evans turns to books. But depictions of hoards and hoarders are few and often sparse, except in one surprising place.

The empty bungalow

Grandma’s unsteady piles of stuff have been dismantled and dispersed. From an empty bungalow, Georgie Evans makes a plea for hoarding behaviour to be better understood.

About the contributors

Georgie Evans

(she/her)

Author

@georgievans on Twitter

Georgie Evans is a writer and bookseller from Halifax. She has an MA from Goldsmiths University and has published words in Brixton Review of Books, the Rialto, the Pomegranate, and the Telegraph. She is currently working on a hybrid non-fiction book about deafness and dementia.

Nicole Coffield