Come As You Really Are

Why do we collect? Throughout history, humans have imbued collections of objects with importance, from the piles of jewellery found in tombs from 100,00 BCE to the cabinets of curiosities enjoyed in Renaissance Europe. Reports show a third of the British population maintains some form of collection. Despite this, collecting is often framed as a faintly neurotic practice, something for those with too much time on their hands, and certainly not an art form. 

Come As You Really Are, the latest exhibition from Artangel, renowned for commissioning exceptional art in unexpected places, is a necessary corrective. The brainchild of Jarman Award-winning artist Hetain Patel, who encouraged people with a nationwide call out for submissions to share their hobbies (and received over 1500 of them), the show is a fascinating insight into the art of collecting and the hobbies of the nation that drive to obsession. 

Sprawling across the labyrinthine rooms of Grants, a former department store in Croydon, the show features over 14,000 objects, from a room stuffed with 4000 My Little Pony dolls to a comprehensive array of milk bottle tops. The two-level space is curated by Hetain to sensitively showcase mixed, or full, collections of the nation’s varied hobbies. 

Patel himself is a Spiderman obsessive who announced the show last year clad in one of the remarkable custom-made costumes he learned from YouTubers to make. “There is a vulnerability in sharing something so personal which often happens in private spaces around the responsibilities of daily life,” he said of the show, and throughout, hobbies emerge as both a form of intimacy and a means of resisting expectations of endless productivity. 

If you go just for the sheer, overwhelming tapestry of hobbies on display you won’t be disappointed. But perhaps more touchingly, it is a beautiful demonstration that the crafts and collection we do binds us perhaps more than the obvious ethnic, religious, moral and even sartorial communities we tend to compartmentalise (and Census on). Come As You Really Are is truly an investigation into the psyche of what the United Kingdom does in its free, precious time.

The exhibition is free to the public and runs until the 20th of October before touring across the country next year with 13 partnering institutions. Alongside the exhibition, workshops with hobbyists are programmed across the summer.