Muristek
Artist Mark Hearld’s four-storey home in York is choc full of objects and displays
There is a dresser or display cabinet in almost every room in artist Mark Hearld’s house. In the front room, for example, he commissioned a local furniture maker to build an enormous, architectural “cabinet of curiosities”. Placed on the shelves or tucked under the arches are objects and ephemera gathered over a lifetime of making, finding, swapping and collecting. “The Laurence Sterne bust on the top shelf is based on the one in Shandy Hall by Joseph Nollekens,” explains Hearld. “The crepe paper party hat he’s wearing is from the Porte de Vanves flea market in Paris. I’ve brought the two together in an irreverent pairing, because I felt that the bust was a little too serious for my house. The party hat brings him to life in a sort of fusion of high literary culture and 1930s party culture – a bohemian mashup, if you like.”
For Hearld – whose work encompasses collage, textile and wallpaper design, linocut printing and sculpture – the art of bargain hunting is akin to an act of creativity. “I find buying or finding an object is quite similar to actually creating one yourself,” he has previously explained. “They both satisfy a similar aesthetic impulse. Obviously if you make it, it’s a bit more virtuous, but if you find something cheap and you bring it home, that does feel almost like an act of creativity. And then, placing it next to other things is like making a 3D collage.”
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