The Pockets of my Jeans

The Pockets of my Jeans is a very personal and meaningful collection of yellow items from my past, stacked and layered in a column stretching from floor to ceiling. Within this work I explore the idea that meaning is created through our objects.

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The writer Andrei Platonov talks of “the thriftiness of empathy” and describes a man who collected singular items for the spiritual significance they had for him: 

 

“Voshchev sometimes bent down and picked up a pebble, or other sticky bit of trash, and put it for safekeeping into his trousers. He was gladdened and worried by the nearly eternal presence of pebbles in the midst of clay, in their abundant accumulation there; that meant that it was useful for him to be there, that there was all the more reason for a person to live.”

 

The colour yellow has many connotations.  For me it is a reminder of my childhood.  Being the youngest of three children meant that I always received toys and gifts that were yellow, instead of the more “beautiful” colours pink and blue, which were reserved for my sister and brother. Yellow also has the spiritual significance of symbolising the solar plexus, which is the seat of the personal self.