COLLECTIONS OF COLLECTIONS
04.26 - 08.26

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Outcome:

Collections of Collections is an artist anthology exploring why and what contemporary artists collect. The project brings together ten artists with ties to the Glasgow School of Art as students, staff and alumni, documenting their collections through in-person interviews, photography and collaborative arrangement. These became (Vol .1): The GSA Edition.

The project emerged from an ongoing artistic, curatorial and archival investigation into collection and accumulation in contemporary art, particularly from the question: “When does a collection become an archive?” The resulting publication takes the form of a C4 manila string-and-washer envelope containing individual interview texts, collection image cards and artist information. It is unbound, allowing its contents to be collected, arranged and re-curated. The publication becomes a collection in its own right, extending the project beyond documenting the artists’ collections and into questions of how information is organised and encountered.

Collections of Collections is also a project about systems. The selection and communication of artists, interviews, photography, editing, indexing, printing, assembly, distribution and audience participation all required systems for managing information at scale. These systems are underpinned by an ethical and curatorial framework of care: considering the objects being collected, and how knowledge is stored, accumulated, shared, accessed and interpreted.

The project launched at The Glad Café on 24 July 2026, featuring a discussion panel with five contributing artists and the curator, alongside a participatory collections table where audiences could select individual pages and build their own publication, extending the collection into a material and social act. The publication was then shown again at the Glasgow School of Art 2026 Postgraduate Degree Show, including a video of the collections table, and transcript of the artist discussion panel in the raw form. This was shown alongside the full publication contents and artifacts contributing to the making of the 120 final editions of Collections of Collections (Vol .1) which is going on to become publicly available online at:

www.colectionsofcollections.co.uk.

Tricia Blakstad: Perspectives (upcoming)