Please go to the Text section for further documentation and for Danny Birchall's MA dissertation on Institution and Intervention: Artists’ Projects in Object-Based Museums.
Since 2000 I have been working under the heading The Collection of Ordure, founding the immaterial Museum of Ordure with two others in 2002. The recent paintings all sit within the concept of The Collection of Ordure.
The Collection of Ordure began in the middle 90s when I was living in Spitalfields. The first showing of some of the Ordure works was in 'Black', a one person exhibition of my work at the South London Gallery. The Collection of Ordure was later shown in a different curated form at the Freud Museum in 2003 and continues to grow. The Freud Museum show was conceived with reference to a dream of Freud’s involving a Museum of Excrement.
Two publications were made as part of the Collection. In 2003 and 2004, a publication by the Freud Museum with a text by Michael Newman which looks at my performance work, and my text Beyond Reason-Ordure (published by Bookworks), which is a fictional account of the fictitious R Y Sirb, an alter ego of myself which sought to reveal a kind of living and thinking in relation to performative attitudes and behaviours.
My view of the Collection hovers around the subject of death. The studio photograph where two chairs have been added seems to suggest that the collection (as a work) forms a body of its own which associates itself with the notion of the dead. This view connects to other works I have done. A recent video work (2007-8) entitled Estonia for example approaches the subject through the sinking of the ferry Estonia in 1994 with the loss of over 800 lives. And it I true that death is inextricably connected to living. There are many resonances. The permanence of war in human society, witness current events in Iraq and Afghanistan, countries we have invaded, is another example.
Retrospectively, The Collection of Ordure can be seen as a long term project.