Shopping Lists: A Consuming Fascination
Ingrid Swenson
Some years ago, Ingrid Swenson began collecting found shopping lists from the same North London Waitrose.
Enlightening and funny, fascinating, and poetic, these private notes to self-detailing someone's weekly shop-rocket and antibacterial wipes, treacle and prawns, fags and milk - invite us to speculate on and imagine the private universes of their authors. They are, in effect, domestic haikus, scribbled on the back of letters and bills.
Having formed the basis of an exhibition at the Art Workers' Guild in 2017, Shopping Lists documents a consuming fascination - of both Swenson's and her subjects' - providing an amusing, insightful and occasionally profound insight into the lives of ordinary Londoners.
HARDBACK PUBLISHED ON: 14/09/2023
£9.99
Praise for Shopping Lists
‘F***ing genius’ – Stanley Tucci
About the author
Ingrid Swenson MBE is a curator and writer. From 1998 to 2021 she was the director of acclaimed arts organisation, PEER. Previous to this she worked at other London-based arts organisations including the ICA, Serpentine, Whitechapel and The Contemporary Art Society.
She has commissioned and presented the work over 150 UK-based and international artists over her long career, including Martin Creed, Raymond Pettibon, Mike Nelson, Siobhan Hapaska, Fiona Banner and more recently Jadé Fadojutimi, Samson Kambalu and Lubna Chowdhary. She is passionate about communicating visual art's ability to connect people and ideas across cultures, generations, and geographies.
Her celebrated book about art for young audiences, Masterpieces in Pieces, A Young Person's Guide to Taking Great Art Apart, was published summer 2022.