This month’s theme is “Accumulation: Between Archive and Excess”.
Accumulation has long been a driving force in art, literature, and culture. To accumulate is to gather, layer, and preserve—but also to risk being overwhelmed.
Artists and writers have returned to this theme again and again, fascinated by the way repetition and excess can both illuminate and obscure meaning.
When does collecting become obsession?
When does memory preservation become clutter?
How do artists navigate the line between archive and overload, ritual and compulsion, meaning and noise?
Accumulation is therefore not only an artistic strategy, but also a human one. It speaks to desire and anxiety, possession and loss, creativity and illness.
To accumulate is to leave a trace—but also to risk being buried under what we keep.
Artist: The Poetry Beast
@the_poetry_beast
https://www.facebook.com/thepoetrybeast
@thepoetrybeast
https://thepoetrybeast.bandcamp.com/
Description: Madness of Collecting visualises the psychological weight of accumulation. Encased within a sea of books, clocks, toys, and forgotten objects, the poem reflects on the feverish impulse to gather and possess. The grayscale palette evokes both memory and decay, turning ordinary detritus into a monument of human desire. The work meditates on the thin boundary between preservation and obsession—where the act of keeping becomes its own kind of burial.
Artist Statement — Accumulation
My work treats accumulation as a verb—an active choreography of holding, layering, and re-sounding the ordinary until it changes state. I’m drawn to the minor archives we build without meaning to: pockets and browsers, drawers that refuse to close, photo rolls that repeat the same sky until the sky becomes a chorus.
In poems, fragments, and micro-fiction, I try to make the overlooked item ring again—not to worship excess, but to listen inside it: a ticket stub as liturgy, a voice memo as inheritance, a jar as a temporary cathedral for air. Formally, I move between list, instruction, and narrative to mimic how memory actually behaves—looping, misfiling, returning at odd hours with perfect detail and missing dates—so that repetition becomes both engine and echo.
The pieces sit between archive and overload: less about romanticising the past than noticing the present tense hidden inside piles, feeds, and stacks. I’m interested in the thin seam where collecting becomes compulsion, where preservation turns to clutter, where meaning flickers between signal and noise.
Accumulation, for me, is less about owning things than about attention—how attention gathers, crowds, and arranges the world. The keepsake is simply where attention decided to sleep; the work is the moment it wakes and asks what must be kept, and what we must let go.
Accumulation 2 explores the haunting beauty of material excess. Against a backdrop of worn objects—books, clocks, toys—the poem drifts like a whisper of conscience, its words curved and ghostlike across the scene. The text evokes the spectral nature of ownership, suggesting that every item we keep holds a trace of ourselves. In this still life of clutter and decay, memory and matter intertwine, revealing how the act of collecting can transform both space and spirit.
Artist: Shahar Tuchner
https://www.facebook.com/TuchnerShahar/
@shahartuchner
www.shahartuchner.com
The Persil Tower – Rabota!
*(2010, manipulated readymade, 60 × 60 × 135 cm)*
"The Persil Tower – Rabota!" explores the weight of accumulation - not of possessions, but of labour, repetition, and human endurance. A janitor, confined within the rigid frame of his work, stands as both worker and sculpture, an embodied archive of gestures, exhaustion, and necessity.
The installation assembles a constellation of cleaning objects - washing powder, a plunger, a garbage bin - each element a modest instrument of order that becomes, when gathered, a monument to the invisible systems that sustain daily life. Within this fragile tower of labour, accumulation is no longer material but existential: the piling up of hours, movements, and obligations.
The work reflects on how routine can transform into entrapment, and how identity may be shaped by what one repeatedly performs. It is a quiet study of dignity and constraint, of work that both maintains and consumes.
Through its manipulated readymade structure, "The Persil Tower - Rabota!" turns accumulation into both form and subject - revealing the delicate point where the human body becomes the archive of its own persistence.
Artist: Tavarna Garvey
https://substack.com/@eyesoftavarna
Description: My work is a series of still life images of miniature photography accompanied by a short story is titled 'ONLY THE ESSENTIALS'. I was inspired by the work of Barbara Kruger to comment on my own tendency towards consumerism.
Artist: Paul Matosic
www.matosic.net
Description: Most of my work makes use of accumulated objects/materials. Usually, waste materials such as polystyrene packaging, redundant computers, hard trash, and the leftovers of consumerism. Cheap and plentiful, it speaks volumes about our disposable society. In recent work, I have continued this process using reclaimed wood offcuts to construct groups of small sculptures that can be organised and reorganised at will. In an exhibition, this becomes an inclusive democratic way of making art. You will have to look on my website to see this work.
Artist: Igal Stulbach
stulbach.com
@igalstulbach
Description: "Sitting". I like chairs and other objects people sit on.
Artist: Andy Mosse
Andymosse.com
Description: Andy Mosse’s drawing and painting explores the complex landscape of memory, treating memory as a dynamic, shifting experience rather than a static record. Using imagery sourced from found objects, old photographs, and objects he’s accumulated, he builds compositions that blur the line between narrative and abstraction, inviting viewers to engage with memory in their own way.
Artist: Yana Dmitrieva
@yana_dmitrieva.art
https://yanadmitrieva.art/
Description: For the theme of accumulation, I suggest my work that reflects this topic through an accumulation of children's toys.
The work shows a bunch of endless material things like dolls, plush animals and other toys that were bought to the child as a reward for good behaviour, as a replacement of parents' attention or simply as a distraction from the child's tantrum. This way, each object represents an emotion (distress, sadness, boredom, and joy), making out of an accumulation of toys an accumulation of feelings and emotions.
The objects that were once treasured and prized now lie in a messy pile of plastic, representing forgotten memories of childhood.
Artist: Hazel Stileman
https://www.hazelstileman.com/
Description: After having created “Holding on to Everything", where I embroidered a found builder's glove with my mother’s old jewellery, I am now in the process of creating “Holding on to More”, embroidering a second glove with more ephemera, from found textile pieces, second hand beads, old buttons, and small things collected over the years. Combining the lost with the nostalgic, the piece is playful and childlike, playing on that feeling of the inevitability of growing up, not wanting to let go of the past, and seeing older memories through that childlike lens, whilst transforming the lost glove into something fantastical through intimate and slow labour and care. They are a comment on the sentimental value we give things - the original glove was made with my mother’s old jewellery, but I have displayed it next to beads that were unwanted in charity shops and rubbish found in the street, sewn onto a discarded glove. This laborious adorning of rubbish onto rubbish renders the glove a special, but now without function.
Artist: Rachael Barns
www.rachaelbarns.art
Description: The accumulation of stuff encouraged by runaway capitalism is harming the planet. We already have enough. Human over-consumption, waste production and (ineffective) waste management are causing devastating effects globally. I see potential in waste materials, I find use for my own rubbish – packaging, old clothes, domestic textiles. I collect discarded items I find in the street. I have become known to friends and family as accepting their interesting rubbish and struggling to say no to anything.
My work aims to transform and elevate what was considered waste into abstract forms. My work features organic, repetitive shapes and patterns with circles as a recurring theme. These tactile, 3D biomorphic sculptures and wall hangings are inspired by the physical and psychological benefits of spending time in nature. I invite viewers to reflect on the harm we are causing through over-consumption and waste production. How can we produce less waste and protect the Earth?
Medium: Gathered (wall-hanging, 87 x 44 x 3 cm. )Old clothes, plastic milk cartons, tomato puree tubes, plastic sheeting found in a hedge.
Artist: Alan Dunn
www.alandunn67.co.uk
Description: These are images from an ongoing series 'ZERO PLAN' (2014-infinity) documenting the (perhaps futile) acquisition of multiple copies of Paul Young’s 1983 LP ‘No Parlez’ from small independent record shops, with the following manifesto: try to pay no more than the original 1983 price of £4, do not buy copies online, take a photograph at the shop, chat with the staff and ask if they also stock records by local bands. Make a zine about the project. Start a 'Spotters League' to encourage others to find copies. Current 'No Parlez' count = 546.
Artist: Sena Başöz
www.senabasoz.info
Description: A Consolation (2020)
During her work with the Hrant Dink Archive for the creation of the 23,5 Hrant Dink Memory Site, the artist revisited her own personal archive of photographs, writings, and printed materials. In this process, she questioned the future of accumulated personal stories and knowledge—those that leak through the linear narratives of human lives and elude institutional structures. A looping video of Posidonia oceanica, a seaweed native to the Mediterranean, is displayed next to a pile of shredded materials from her own archive. The seaweed formally mirrors the shredded archive. Can the underwater meadow offer a consolation for the lost, the destroyed, or the forgotten in a morass of information? The artist reflects on cycles of knowledge and memory through the seaweed that sway collectively in an underwater meadow before drifting away, eventually forming piles on beaches, and then turning into compost.
Artist: Gaspar Marquez
https://www.gmarquezphoto.com/
Description: The theme is accumulation, and this concept only exists in the human mind. I'm doing my best to actually represent this meaning in a visual way without being too explicit. I got a body of work of 3 images, the first one was shot in Times Square, New York city, and it represents all the visual accumulation that's being thrown on us constantly, it's a non stop bombardment of visual imagery, advertising, marketing, 24/7 all year round, that after 2 minutes or so, it turns into visual contamination, but some people love being there. The second one is a representation of all these non consciously juxtaposed posters laid out on top of each other over and over again throughout the years on the streets of New York, as a result creating a non-voluntary cool collage. And the last one represents the accumulation of Wall Street, how much is enough? That's what I would like to ask the people who run it...
Artist: Clair Robins
@clairscollections @clair_r_Photo
www.clairrobins.com
Description: "Brussels and Bleach" - These found shopping lists become accidental portraits of ordinary lives, each scrap capturing a moment of planning, memory, and need. I have been collecting them for years, but I have noticed there are far fewer nowadays with 'digital notes/lists’ and home deliveries. They form an archive of the everyday, revealing habits, likes and prompts like "Don't forget Maureen's birthday card". Saving these lists transforms them from disposable reminders into artefacts of human presence. In their imperfections, trampled, smudges, misspellings, hurried handwriting, I can glimpse into other people’s world and dinner choices.