Hobbies are a vehicle for self-expression

I need human connection. I need to feel like I exist in the world, and I need to not feel alone.

Art helps me do this. In return for the privilege of being a full-time artist, I try to express myself as honestly and as deeply as I can, and to offer this to anyone engaging with my work. This is not easy, as it requires a willingness to be vulnerable. But in the moments that it works, it feels as if I gain a bit more access to myself, and to others. And as an introvert, these connections are often deeper than I am able to get in my day-to day-life.

I have always been moved by acts of self-expression from people that are not required to do it for their job. Community singers, quilt makers, miniature modellers and the like – hobbyists. I am fascinated by hobbies as vehicles for honest self-expression. In the two-and-half-year process of researching and creating Come As You Really Are, alongside the Artangel team, we spoke to hundreds of UK hobbyists from different backgrounds and demographics, all devoted to one or sometimes multiple hobbies involving crafting, modifying or collecting.

While what they were doing was often different from one another, there were two surprising commonalities that struck me. First, the hobbyists were incredibly humble about what they do, even when sometimes they were hand crafting what, to my eye, were expert levels of fabrication. Most were shy about their hobby, revealing something incredibly vulnerable about them. 

Second, hobbyists are often unconcerned with originality – it turns out that self-expression just doesn’t require it. The very act of making – of creating – is enough on its own. I love this. It suggests that creativity and self-expression is accessible to everyone; a human right, rather than the privileged act society tells us it is. 

Among the objects in the show are some of my works, specifically things that for me have hobbyist sensibilities at their core – dedication of time, obsessive manual labour and DIY approaches to production.

Since 2014, following YouTube tutorials from hobbyist cosplayers, I have created three different Spider-Man suits, each taking about four months of labour at my kitchen table. But while I knew that as an artist I would end up exhibiting these publicly, the main reason I started making them is because I wanted to know what it would feel like to put on a Spider-Man suit of movie-replica quality, and to look at myself in the mirror and see Spider-Man looking back. I wanted that feeling badly.

Growing up, I always felt as if I didn’t fit anywhere, physically or culturally. But when I put this suit on for the first time, I felt protected and powerful. It was me, but in a way I hadn’t seen before. 

For Come As You Really Are, I wanted to celebrate the power of hobbies - the audacity of carving out some time, in our often busy lives, to do something where we create our own rules and, for a short time, live life on our own terms. With hundreds of hobbyists and more than 14,000 objects on display, we wanted to give a sense of the power of people. A place where we could stand in our vulnerability through the collective strength of doing it with others. A place that works against subjective hierarchies of best and worst, but offers a sense of all the different things we are doing, and how complex we are as people. 

There is something really freeing about seeing so many different ways of doing things, all displayed together and connected through a sense of play. 

Hetain Patel is an artist