LUCINDA MUDGE | Collectors

LUCINDA MUDGE | Collectors

I have always presented my work in collections, building an exhibition slowly over the course of a year, watching it take shape in the studio before it becomes a solo show.

Some of these vases have sat with me for a year. I see them every morning in the studio, and over that year I have grown to love them — though the love is rarely immediate. There is often a first disappointment: opening the kiln to a colour I did not expect can be a real let-down. But this is what makes a collection interesting. It needs the strange piece as much as the beautiful one, the grimy alongside the polished. Ceramics lends itself particularly well to this, since the process is so hard to control.

The bookshelf paintings in this exhibition are collections too, assembled the way a real one is: over time, with patience. What accumulates, shelf by shelf, is not a still life so much as an inventory of a mind — its earliest instincts beside its latest, its wit stored next to its wounds, everything labelled.

Our lives work the same way. We collect and lose friends, and our lives change shape as we do. Families grow, then shrink. A house fills with objects and then, at some point, rather sadly, empties, and the collection disperses. This year I went to my thirty-year school reunion — its own kind of curatorial problem: a room full of people who share one trauma, that of having attended high school together, comparing notes on what happened next. Some barely recognisable, all still technically part of the same set.

Collecting, in the end, is just another word for living: gathering what matters, losing what we must, and calling what remains a life.

To request the exhibition catalogue, please contact gallery@everard.co.za