When we opened the gallery last year, we started asking a question we hadn’t asked out loud before: what does it actually mean to collect? The institutional answer — investment, status, credentials — didn’t interest us. We wanted to know what it means as a personal practice, the accumulation of objects that mean something before you can explain why.
We asked five people connected to TWS to write about it in their own words. No interviews, no profiles — just direct access to how they think about the things they gather. The results surprised us: sticker collections from childhood, graffiti books tracked across price-comparison sites during a parent’s illness, cameras understood as philosophies of seeing, a pandemic broken open by a box of stamps. Each one a different answer to the same question, each one also a portrait of a life.
We’ve been publishing these texts over the past months on the site. If you missed them, here’s the whole series.
Max traces his collecting life from childhood sticker obsessions through fanzines, screen prints, and swapped originals with artists he’s met through fifteen years of TWS. The thread running through it isn’t accumulation — it’s exchange. Each piece marks a conversation, a trip, a moment of gratitude or admiration. The collection is a documentary practice as much as anything else.
“Each one of these pieces is not only a great work of art, but also a mark of a moment where an artist and I exchanged something meaningful.”
We featured Eduardo’s text in a previous issue, but it belongs here too. He collects vintage magazines, CDVs, and ephemera — not because he knows what they’ll become, but because he senses something is there before he can name it. He also argues that the mental archive you build from years of looking is just as generative as anything physical. We agree.
“I collect because I don’t yet know what it is, but I sense there’s something there.”
The California-based artist writes about the feedback loop between sourcing and making — how the materials he finds shape the work, and how the work shapes what he looks for next. Fifteen years of vintage clothing collecting trained the same eye he brings to old photographs and postcards. Everything has to click.
“I believe one thing that sets an artist apart is their specific eye.”
The most personal text in the series. Cless has been collecting since 1989 — stamps first, then graffiti books, trading cards, spray cans, vinyl figures, zines, fruit stickers, tart cards — and his house holds all of it, organized with the care of an archivist. He writes about tracking book prices daily, about the pandemic paralysis that stamps helped break, about more than 2,000 book titles, at least 10% still sealed. Searching, he says, relaxed him whether he found something or not. It kept him moving.
“Those were very difficult times for me, and I have to admit that searching, finding, and collecting became almost like a religion.”
Sònia — art historian, cultural manager, TWS team member — writes about cameras, movie posters, and British stamps. Three collections that don’t add up to a coherent identity but share a common function: getting closer to reality through fragments. Her framing is precise and worth sitting with. She argues that a collection is a method, one you return to from different angles rather than complete.
“If reality is too wide to hold, the collection is one way to approach it.”
Given everything Cless just told you about his relationship with preservation, accumulation, and the objects that carry personal history — it feels right to point you toward his print.
Jaggernauta is part of TWS Editions #1: The Original Weirdos. Cless designs every piece in Photoshop first, then executes it by hand with a precision that takes years to develop. What looks dense and layered on screen is, in person, a study in control — every cut placed exactly where it needs to be. Available in three sizes, short print run.
Stay Weird
A collection is never finished. That’s the point.
— The Weird Show
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