I cannot picture this space without the auto trolley in the corner immediately to the left of the doorway. The otherwise unremarkable auto trolley holds several books and small cardboard boxes all containing postage stamps of various ages and nationality. The books have the stamps affixed on their pages with little glassine paper hinges in a manner I would describe as filling space without any logic other than to maximise the space of the page—to fit as many as possible. There is no attempt to recognise any aesthetic or design value in the stamps, nor monetary value, nor personal value/appreciation. They are simply placed according to when they are purchased/received and country of origin. Thus the albums become a chronological picture on the nature of a repetitive pursuit known as stamp collecting.

The time involved in sourcing, soaking, preparing and positioning the stamps in the albums confounds the logic of their individual date and value. If they were organised according to the their date primarily, and secondarily to their value (within series), there would not be a relation to when they were sourced and the acts being performed. Rather, it is the recording of a human endeavour based on immediacy that supplants any need for a proper philatelic system; the act of living is not organised philatelicly.

Though you can correctly argue that the stamp signifies a cultural history on the values of time and place, I prefer to regard the action of collecting within a schema signifying spatial-object relationships. The reader of stamps is after all the person who collects and stores them; this amateur collector has no personal, social or professional philatelic associations. If each stamp is a fragment that has a limited range of signification, its context within a system of lived time logically alludes to death. When the last stamp is stuck down death is imminent.

These stamps, this method of collecting is not unlike taking photographs; they allude to the time when the subject and the author will be dead, the space where the reader confronts there own demise: the blank incomplete pages of the stamp album. These little fragments coalesce, muster, gather and splinter, negating any possibility of a totalizing objective; the sly rouse of the stamp/photo album. The groupings are there as signs of an action, the signifiers are amorphous and variously split, spliced and reordered according to the page you open. The stamps are collected as an action that unconsciously eschews the need for photographs of people. The album must be incomplete.