The Stamp Collector

The Stamp Collector is a near exact replica of my father’s combined study, bedroom, and storeroom.  All objects in this space were carefully selected from charity shops or borrowed from family and friends, to resemble the items in my father’s room as closely as possible.  The viewer is invited to enter the room. 

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Ilya Kabakov’s installations of people’s peculiar living spaces serve as inspiration for this work.  Yet where Kabakov invented his characters and their worlds, I found a similarly idiosyncratic character in my father. Like Kabakov’s Garbage Man who surrounded himself with his seemingly value-less possessions, my father has literally immersed himself in his stamp collection by combining his bedroom and study into a single space where he spends most of his day. Through this work I consider the idea of the one-to-one scale map as well as the sign, whereby a thing can at once be a metaphor and the real thing. 

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