‘Enter the world of multimedia artist Ingrid Brooker, who grew up in antique shops and keeps a bizarre range of bric-a-brac in bags, bottles and scrapbooks’

In 2005 I was one of 12 people to receive a grant from The National Museum of Australia to create a short film about  ‘collecting’. 

A lifetime of hoarding has resulted in a vast and eclectic collection of collections for Melbourne based animator and multimedia artist, Ingrid K. Brooker. From bizarre to banal, Ingrid’s collections include light globe packets, surgical instruments, X-rays, letraset, petrol numbers, clock parts, gasmasks, discarded tickets, laboratory glass, vintage ledgers, and a gamut of other things she finds lying around. Born into the trash and treasure trade, Ingrid’s lifelong exposure to markets, auctions, op shops and skip diving has made sourcing weird and wonderful relics second nature.

Collecting, by nature, revolves around the thrill of acquisition and the pleasure of quantifying and categorising. But for Ingrid the indulgence does not end there. Her collecting tendencies constantly infiltrate her artwork. The artefacts and oddments she covets end up in scrapbooks, mixed media artworks, films, sculptures and animations.

The piece created for the Icollect project showcases a cross section of Ingrid’s collections. Emphasis is placed on the beauty in the intricate detail of objects. The film also demonstrates the way in which dissimilar objects can be grouped by disparate categories. The entire project is created with stop motion animation – a particular passion of Ingrid’s which allows her a means of giving life to the things she collects.