Hetain Patel and his Spiderman suit photographed by Thierry Bal. Courtesy of Artangel
Come as you really are
Text by Nell Whittaker
All over the UK, people – in isolation, in groups, in their homes or outdoors – are busy doing something for sheer pleasure. The hobby can be any habit or activity from which a person gains no tangible benefit except enjoyment. Artangel and Hetain Patel’s exhibition Come as You Really Are had its first home in Grants, Croydon, an old Wetherspoons pub, where it extended across many rooms and over two floors, filling the entire space – walls, floor and ceiling – with the massed evidence of hundreds of individual hobbies. The result of a call-out to the nation, the show displayed collections, catalogues, toys, crafts and art, from a 4,000-strong My Little Pony figurine collection to a giant pair of hands made from garden wire. More ephemeral hobbies – wild swimming, model plane flying – were represented in a video installation. In all, the exhibition was the result of many hours of work and many individual passions. How can we understand this vast network of activity? And what are we talking about when we talk about hobbies?
1. Ruaidhri O’Mahony makes puppets, masks, sculptures, photos, illustrations, music, paintings and poems – all “things”, as he describes them, that are “usually weird”.
2. Kyriakos Tsirigotis draws almost every day: “it relaxes me.”
3. Peter Goodwin began collecting Lego when he was very young, and in adulthood turned his hobby into a business by displaying his models at Lego shows to promote his online Bricklink account. “I love building with Lego,” he says, “because you can build anything you can imagine.”
4. Ruby Smith describes quiltmaking as a “marker or time” – from fragment to an assemblage then to an item of warmth and comfort, in a process that is sensory at every stage.
5. Ben Stanley is a communications manager for a charity who makes working replicas of puppets, Muppets and cartoon characters, all out of A4 sheets of paper. Beginning as an attempt to entertain his young son, Stanley’s practice is “part sculpture, part paper engineering, part artistry and imagination” – and all the creations are designed to be played with.
6. Willo Williams will be 80 in March. As the only child of working-class parents, she spent a lot of time at her grandmother‘s, where she drew and made things as her grandmother knitted. After a career in art, design and fashion in Zambia, she returned to the UK and became a sculptor. Now, she is “compelled to just create”, using materials from fabric to CDs to cement.
7. Adam Buss has had a life-long obsession with collecting football shirts. Beginning with a pure love of the game, his interest has grown deeper as football shirts – and football itself – have become part of social and political campaigns. “It’s me”, he says, “and yet it is global.”
8. James Duffy takes his collection of action figures and toys outside into his local area to stage these dramatic scenes – either recreated from films and TV, or original inventions.
9. Ken Ford has been collecting objects since the 1950s. His collection of supermarket bags now contains many that have been lost to the storms of modernisation, becoming relics of an older commercial age long before the era of the 10p charge.
10. Elly Gausden is a crocheter who has made “viking hats for whole families, Baby Yoda hats for babies, neckwear for cats, potted plants for my office, shawls that have kept people cosy as they died, and blankets that have wrapped up new babies”.
11. Miranda Worby, now 41, has been collecting My Little Pony figurines all of her life; the act of collecting, she says, takes her back to the happy state of childhood. Many hobbies formed in childhood continue through the rest of the hobbyist’s life as a means to access some of the escapist fictive pleasures of early encounter and acquisition.
12. Ken Ford’s collection of KitKat boxes were, like his plastic bags on the previous page, gathered as a means to trace the brand’s changing design and branding. Ford has several large collections, including over 3,000 theatre programmes and World Fair memorabilia.
13. Lauren Godfrey is a “frustrated artist and mother” whose creative pancake-making started in lockdown. Starting with a Peppa Pig, the designs have since become more and more adventurous (and involve the use of several piping bags).
14. Harrison Jones is a UK-based artist who uses his practice of collecting and customising model daleks and Transformers to jolt him from creative block. To date, he has between 300 and 400 daleks and 300 Transformers.
15. Annabel Jolly’s interest in shells was formed as a child beachcombing on the Isles of Scilly. Now retired and living in the Midlands, Jolly creates mirrors, picture frames and wall art from shells found in Cornwall, Wales and Norfolk, or donated by local friends and restaurants.
16. Lisa Beasley is predominantly a needle felter but also practices watercolour painting, embroidery and mixed media.
17. Lee-Anne Willis crochets figures and scenes to adorn postboxes in her local area. “I love making my community brighter with my creations,” she says. “It‘s wonderful how much the people in my village look forward to a new design.”
18. Valorie Watson got into soapmaking when she became an orphan aged 47. After Googling “Supporting Orphan Adults Project“, she saw the initials spelled out “soap” which, when she was unable to find support online, ended up becoming an aid to her grief and loss. Soapmaking also helps her as an autistic person to stay calm, grounded and centred. “I know that my parents would be over the moon to know that I had this creativity in me all along,” she says, as part of this project that “showcases regular people like me and the things we do that make us happy.”
19. Julie Upmeyer and Jonathan Lewis made this traditional coracle at their home in North Wales, which has a large pond. As a retired competitive swimmer and artist, Upmeyer decided to build the coracle as another means of interacting with water.
20. Mark “Man of Tin” Norris collects and repairs old lead toy soldiers. “Whether it is a simple rifle repair with wire, a touch of shiny paint restoration or a complete rebuild of a figure from metal detector broken finds, I find it both very relaxing and challenging, putting some pride back into those tiny tin hearts.”
21. Will Farr’s dayjob is in healthcare, but in the rest of his time he practices Crittermix: creating new figures from discarded dolls and soft toys rescued from the recycling centre. Crittermix is both a creative practice and Farr’s way of dealing with the “overwhelming and upsetting” amount of stuff that is fed every day into landfill.
