Since February, artist Hetain Patel has been gathering hobbyists from across Britain. Quilters, cosplayers and nail-art innovators. Mosaicists, ceramicists and chain-mail linkers. Doll modifiers, wood turners, scrapbookers and yarn bombers. Collectors of postcards, figurines and carrier bags.
Patel’s exhibition, Come As You Really Are, is a wittily choreographed display of a dizzying 14,000 loaned objects. A long countertop performs as a battlefield to Warhammer figurines, lead soldiers, Star Wars fighters and other tiny fantastical warriors. Across them, Cindy dolls and their dogs stride like Biba-clad colossi. A tiny diorama dressed with greenery from a model railway displays modified acrylic nails, micro origami and thimble-sized ceramics. Quilts, weavings and embroideries hang in obeisance around a Ford Escort clad in swirly carpeting.
This is the first exhibition in an itinerant series to be staged by Patel, produced by those reliable purveyors of off-kilter delights, Artangel. As per Artangel custom, the show is housed in a vibe-rich venue: a former Wetherspoons that once occupied two floors of the 1890s Grant’s department store on Croydon High Street. Much pub signage and decor remains, making for entertaining juxtaposition and sleight of hand (the cloakroom is crammed with Polly Pocket toys, while bottles of fruit-infused gin glow behind the bar).
And so comes a shocking revelation: not everyone in Britain devotes their spare time doomscrolling, online stalking and YouTube conspiracy-mongering. Some are instead making coloured pancakes shaped like Homer Simpson. Or carving wooden benches that look like skateboard decks. Or cutting orange peel into hearts and drying them to make firelighters.
Patel is not the first notable artist to show the work of hobbyists. Alan Kane’s 2019 exhibition 4 Bed Detached Home of Metal included recreations of metal fans’ bedrooms. Jeremy Deller’s 1997 The Uses of Literacy shared art dedicated to the Manic Street Preachers. (In the early 2000s, Kane and Deller also worked together on The Folk Archive.) Grayson Perry’s pandemic-era TV show Grayson’s Art Club likewise offered a platform to the nation’s makers.
Patel is doing things on a larger and much broader scale. But in many ways, Come As You Really Are shares their conceptual territory. All cast us into sticky linguistic waters – what is a “professional” artist? Someone who supports themselves through making art? Surely not, since this would discount 90% of those who call themselves artists. An art school degree? A willingness to engage with the market? Fine artists have drawn influence from folk art for decades – look at Wassily Kandinsky’s experiments in reverse glass painting, currently on show at Tate Modern in London.
Patel’s distinction – those who consider art work and those who consider it a hobby – is useful, although they do share something: passion. An amateur is, after all, someone who does a thing out of love. While social media encourages us to turn any skill, quirk or enthusiasm into a commodifiable side hustle, this show is a reminder that hobbies are valuable in their own right as a source of joy, escapism and human connection. As we emerge (God willing) from a political regime that justified underfunding the arts by vilifying them as the preserve of the elite, Patel offers powerful evidence of widespread engagement in making, showing, collecting and performing.
Patel knows this territory from the inside. Objects are shown without labels (a key to the display will be made available). Only after my visit did I realise he was behind some of my favourite exhibits, including the aforementioned carpet-covered Ford Escort and a full-size Transformer robot made out of a Ford Fiesta. (He’s also made a film celebrating hobbies beyond the scope of exhibition – wild swimmers, dancers, drone flyers and owners of custom cars.) This is a conscious blurring of distinctions. We in the professional art world also have hobbies. Other listed contributors include artist Sista Pratesi, for her “latch hook furnishings”, and Sandy Nairne, former director of the National Portrait Gallery, for his “landscape sketching”.
Like the wider art world, this show is powered by creativity, but also by accumulation. Miranda Worby’s My Little Pony collection occupies a room of its own. Adam Buss’s football shirts cascade down the stairwell. A dresser is stuffed with Tina Leung’s K-pop merch. For all the collections that boggle your mind (used erasers? empty cigarette packets?) there will be others that hit a sweet spot. (Ooh! Catalogued mineral samples!)
Patel’s longer-term project as an artist is to ask how we might rethink identity beyond signifiers of class, heritage and geography. Hobbies offer an opportunity for escapism, a space in which to share passions, or even perform an entirely different identity. Yes, Come As You Really Are is a public celebration of private passions, but it is also an invitation to think about all the novel ways we can connect with one another.
• At the Hobby Cave at Grants, Croydon, until 20 October
