Hetain Patel – interview: ‘Getting to that essence of creation, which is self-expression: that is why this project exists’

Alongside the artist’s own work, which includes a carpet-covered Ford Escort, is a cornucopia of submissions from artists, crafters, collectors and hobbyists, including elaborate cosplay costumes, football shirts, kites and even a Lego underground railway. Here, Patel takes us behind the scenes

Hetain Patel. Photo: © Sam Bush.

by VERONICA SIMPSON

Hetain Patel is going to suffer “withdrawals”, he says, after his Artangel commission, Come As You Really Are, opens to the public this month. Taking shape over two and a half years, this has truly been a passion project not just for Patel and the Artangel team, but for the more than 250 of the UK’s artists, crafters, collectors and hobbyists who have submitted 14,000 of their treasures for this inaugural exhibition (out of 1,500 who responded), which will evolve and travel over the UK until February 2026. It is, truly, “a contemporary portrait of the UK as seen through the lens of the nation’s hobbies”, as Artangel’s publicity declares.

The Croydon installation was still far from complete on a walk through with the artist a week before opening. Even then, the sheer scale of what they have achieved, the quantity and variety of work on show, is almost overwhelming. For the first ever exhibition on this scale of the UK’s amateur crafters and collectors, Patel and his team have truly done these enthusiasts proud. Having now seen the finished installation, the day before the show opened, I would call it Patel’s “love bomb” of creativity for the UK’s hobbyists.

Come As You Really Are by Hetain Patel and Artangel, Grants, Croydon 2024. Photo: Thierry Bal.

Since the call-out for contributions launched in January this year, Patel and his Artangel cohorts have been working flat out sifting, selecting, co-ordinating and setting up the required infrastructure for transporting, caring for and curating this exhilarating show. The generosity and spirit in which it has been conceived and delivered could only have come from an “insider”, as Patel terms himself. A self-confessed Spider-Man obsessive, who has hand-stitched several dedicated Spider-Man costumes (one of which he wore to the Artangel press announcement, earlier this year), this British-Gujarati artist is celebrated for his films and adapted sculptures, including Fiesta Transformer (2013), a Ford Fiesta car that he and his father adapted into a car/robot, in the family’s garage in Bolton.

An unusual dog walk on the Wetherspoon's bar, with home brew bottles among the offerings at the back. Installation view, Come As You Really Are by Hetain Patel and Artangel, Grants, Croydon 2024. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

The setting for this first iteration of Come As You Really Are is suitably characterful: Grants, a Grade II-listed Victorian building, was one of the UK’s first department stores, specialising in tailoring and haberdashery and a first port of call for visiting French travellers, when Croydon boasted the UK’s first airport. It was taken over by Wetherspoons in 2002 and is a classic adaptation in the vein of that popular, low-cost pub chain, creating a richly textured backdrop for this eye-boggling cornucopia of stuff. From exquisitely turned and detailed wooden objects to hand-thrown pottery the size of a thumb, from elaborate cosplay costumes to a select representation from an astonishing 2,000-piece branded plastic bag collection amassed over four decades, these pieces from the UK’s obsessives or devotees fill the walls, ceilings and floors of this former pub.

The exhibition exudes creativity and self-expression, diversity and intensity. This is what Patel was hoping for: creativity, he says, “is for everyone. You don’t have to be an artist or a designer to express yourself. It’s part of our humanity. This should be a human right.”

My Little Pony collection by Miranda Worby in Come As You Really Are by Hetain Patel and Artangel. Photo: Thierry Bal.

Patel completed his BA in fine art at Nottingham Trent University in 2003, and has gone on to show his films, performances, paintings, sculptures and photographs worldwide, including at the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern and the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing. Exploring themes of identity and freedom through popular culture, his TED talk of 2013, Who Am I? Think Again, has been viewed more than 3m times. In 2019 he won the Film London Derek Jarman award and in 2021, he received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Artist Award and a Henry Moore Foundation Award. His works are in the collections of the Tate, the British Council, Arts Council England, Manchester Art Gallery, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, M+ Museum Hong Kong and Fondazione in Between Art Film, Rome.

Veronica Simpson: This is a truly astonishing celebration of creativity behind closed doors. How did you go about reaching out to all these people?

Hetain Patel: It was a mix of online, posting on social media and calling out to local radio stations and local news. But, together with the producers, we spent a year or more visiting a lot of craft fairs, knitting groups and meeting hobbyists and chatting to people.

VS: Did you start with a flood of entries, or was it a tidal wave or a trickle?

HP: At the beginning, there was a flood and then it petered out a bit and then you’d get a boost when something came up on social media.

VS: Did it make a difference that you are a collector and a fan – some of your Spider-Man comics are displayed here, as well as one of your fabulous Spider-Man-inspired outfits, and the Transformers tribute? By way of contrast, if Damien Hirst had put a call out, it is hard to know what we would have got back.

HP: The important thing about this project is that it’s from the inside, not from the top down. One of the reasons I’m so passionate about this project is that I feel I relate to a lot of hobbyists’ sensibilities. Being compelled to make or creating something that you can’t sell – or at least not for a price that would cover your labour … The typical hobbyists don’t have any other motivation than the love of doing it. They don’t need me, they don’t need Artangel to encourage them. They were doing this before the show, and they’ll do it after.

Come As You Really Are by Hetain Patel and Artangel, Grants, Croydon 2024. Photo: Thierry Bal.

VS: How did your sense of what would be in the show evolve as the contributions flowed in? Had you originally envisaged including people’s entire collections?

HP: The more I thought about it, the more this idea of hobbies as being self-expression, a declaration of who you are, still works. It’s the same criteria for collectors: nobody is asking you to do it, you’re doing it because you’re curious or obsessed. And the collections are about that as well. But we also took care to make sure we could display people’s collections in the way that they would display them as well: grouping specific items together in a particular way, so we can get a sense of who they are and how they feel the objects relate to each other. So, the whole exhibition ended up somewhere between collecting, making and modifying.

VS: A week away from opening, are you pleased with how this is all coming together in this space?

HP: Yeah, I just love how people think. You get the breadth, the complexity, it is such a joy. And there are so many different things, we’ve got different taxonomies around the place. There are walls of two-dimensional works, but we’ve got abstract and collage-y patterned work upstairs, and we’ve got an area that’s more figurative downstairs. Elsewhere, we have landscapes.

VS: It is a bit like the Royal Academy Summer Show – but not. Where was all the work being stored as you were selecting it and thinking about how to curate it?

HP: It was a mix of some stuff arriving at the office and some stuff arriving on site, in here. The logistics are just intense. Just the admin, condition-checking, organising transport, working with people who are not used to doing this kind of thing, keeping track of everything that’ll be in the show. You need the systems to log and track it all.

Polly Pockets collection by Emma Stannard in Come As You Really Are by Hetain Patel and Artangel. Photo: Thierry Bal.

VS: There are a few large areas dedicated to one person’s collection. How did you judge whether to take more or less from individuals?

HP: One wall is entirely someone who started collecting Creamer tops and then she started making her own. She kept them in a folder, chronologically. And that’s how they are being shown.

Sometimes, it was about what other things were coming in and wanting to give a spread of what everyone’s doing. If it’s a particular kind of thing we have not seen anywhere else, we might show more of it. But if it’s something we have a lot of, we want to show lots of different ways of doing it. We were trying to think of strategies to avoid value judgment. It’s people’s time. It’s really important that’s valued.

The curation is all about how we can elevate what people are doing, and still respect the material and the craft that’s gone into it. How can we present it in a way that the hobbyist might not be able to do themselves, maybe because of the space they’ve got, or the quantity? It still has to keep the essence of what they’re doing.

VS: It all looks fantastic in this kind of cosy, Wetherspoons aesthetic.

HP: One of our principles was how can we work against the normal museum presentation. This work doesn’t have the history of what’s usually in a museum. These are social spaces, which is reflected in the colouring, the warmth of the wood. There are nice light fittings, which work really well. Where we’ve found this red colour on the wall, we’re adding it to other areas. We’re adding some extra light fittings, just thinking how we can display stuff in a way that feels “object first”. You can read about things in the text we’ll have, but we want you to first experience the objects speaking for themselves. We’re not babying the audiences. We’re also respecting what the hobbyists have made. Typically, they might show their work at a craft fair with terrible lighting, on a crappy table. We can give it more care than that. We’re just trying to give it a luxury feeling, that it’s being taken care of within the resources of the time we’ve got.

Artist Eleanor Roberts with art costumes inspired by everything from menopause to life with ME. Installation view, Come As You Really Are by Hetain Patel and Artangel, Grants, Croydon 2024. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

VS: Have you been steering the curatorial conversations, or have they been more collaborative?

HP: Yeah, I’ve been steering them, but all through conversations with the team. I’ve been working so closely with Artangel for the last two and a half years.

We’re going to have a swarm coming down these stairs hanging from these grids (he gestures to grids drilled into the ceiling above a spiral staircase). We’ll start with someone’s football-shirt collection, and then we’ve got kites, origami, cosplay things, model aeroplanes, and Star Wars ships. So, we’re thinking of different ways to occupy the space. Also, we are putting things put together that wouldn’t normally be seen together.

ME: At what point when the work was coming in did you think: “Oh Yes! This is going to be good!”

HP: Initially, we were just looking at images. It was only when they started arriving, just before install stage. I’d get an excited email from someone on the team: “OMG, look at what’s come in. This is so strange, or this is so amazing.” Now, they almost feel like famous objects, it’s taken so long in the planning.

One of the most inspiring things, for me, is that my art teacher applied. She’s got two paintings here. And I asked if she’d mind me showing a painting alongside it, which I did in school when doing my A-levels. She taught me how to paint. Her name? Christine Southworth. Mrs Southworth to me.

Good art teachers are so influential, thinking about artists, hobbyists, professionals. Yes, she taught me how to paint, but the best thing she did was create this gentle space, this sanctuary, where it was OK to be, and to think, and to give us courage to create. Getting to that essence of creation, which is self-expression: that is why this project exists. Outside all the industry judgment and terms, whether it’s art, design, craft, below it all, that’s the important bit.

And it’s for everyone. You don’t have to be an artist or a designer to express yourself. It’s part of our humanity. This should be a human right. In a way this show, the reason the team and I have worked so hard, we want it to be so packed full of objects that this … power of people becomes undeniable. I don’t want anyone coming to this show to find it cute. It’s got to be like: “Wow! All of this stuff is amazing.”

Come As You Really Are by Hetain Patel and Artangel, Grants, Croydon 2024. Photo: Thierry Bal.

VS: Is this something you have wanted to do for a while? Artangel, as a commissioning body, has a track record for realising artists’ impossible dreams.

HP: Funnily enough, it wasn’t something I’d been pursuing … But I always believed that you should allow yourself to ask: what’s the project you’d never dare to do?

Artangel approached me, and I had several coffees and meetings with Mariam (Zulfiqar, Artangel’s director). I wanted to do it because it’s not something I could do on my own. Everyone is working so hard, yet it’s such a small team for what’s happening here.

VS: Having seen only half of the work installed, I can imagine that everyone who visits will find not one but a zillion things that they will recognise from their own childhood, their family environment.

HP: People will see things that they’d never go to see. And potentially be into it.

We wanted it to be vast enough that you couldn’t consume it. It will consume you. I like the idea that you might leave the show with someone and when you talk about it, you’ll have noticed completely different things. I think also in my work there is this space between something there is recognition for, mixed with something that is totally outside your frame of reference.

1980s Ford Escort, Installation view, Come As You Really Are by Hetain Patel and Artangel, Grants, Croydon 2024. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

VS: Tell us about your new car work.

HP: We bought an old car, from the 1980s, a Ford Escort, one of the cars you used to see everywhere. We have covered it with hand-tufted carpet, in the pattern of a carpet my grandma had. My dad came down for the installation, and we glued it on together, we went through the trimming process, and he also helped me make all the gold details (there is gold around the headlamps and wing mirrors).

The idea for this third room (where the new car work is) came to us early on is: it’s a soft room, so all around the walls there will be quilts, made by individual people and also communities who have created them together.

VS: You also have your new film in this room, which shows hobbies and activities you could not have put in the exhibition?

HP: Yes, there are people who make toy planes, wild swimmers, freestyle dancers, I want to connect some of these activities. There’s a young man in Blackburn who makes these planes for his mates, and they’re really quite magical. There’s a group of young British Asian lads in Bradford who modify American cars. We have Zara who does amazing nail art, which she’s made to emulate the cars, in the same colours as them. She even made a wheel to go on a nail that actually spins.

VS: Watching the film, you can see people are really inspired by being involved in it.

HP: There’s something so joyful about this whole process, people’s spirit. Seeing themselves on the monitor and how they look, they just go crazy for it.

I wanted the film to feel almost narrative. It’s a looping film. The production value is to bring it up to advertising or Hollywood level, but we don’t want it to feel at all like an advert or music video, but showing these activities in a way the hobbyists have never been able to do. The train sets in here have never been shot at night before.

VS: Of course, you couldn’t miss out on the UK’s model railway enthusiasts.

HP: Yes, it’s very difficult to get people’s sets out because they build them into their lofts. The ones we have here in the show are a couple of smaller ones, some very unusual ones. We’ve got a Lego underground railway, which is very beautiful.

Arts and crafts by Evie Hancock in Come As You Really Are by Hetain Patel and Artangel. Photo: Thierry Bal.

VS: After working on such an intense creative and collaborative endeavour, do you feel it has impacted on you or your practice?

HP: Yeah, I already know it will continue to have reverberations for a long time. However, it’s definitely been affirming … about creativity, the creative act. People are amazing, we are amazing. You can’t stop us from creating and expressing ourselves. We’re all different people from different geographies. I need to feel the multiplicity of things. I’ve been thinking about that a lot, in terms of identity. Personally, one of the things that makes me feel free is that there are so many different ways to do anything.

VS: What are you hoping for in the audience response or visitor numbers?

HP: I think it’s going to be a busy show. Every time I speak to people about it, generally, their faces light up, or they tell you a story about their hobby, or something they don’t normally speak to you about. People can be very shy about a hobby, though they don’t feel that way when they are doing it. I am really grateful to people for being willing to show us their stuff, the stuff they do behind closed doors. It’s really vulnerable.

VS: Are you putting people’s names next to their work?

HP: No, there is a map. If you want to find out who made a particular thing, you can find their name and we also put their Instagram or website. We want this to be helpful to people, so we want to make it so that people can find them and, if you like it, contact them. Obviously, we’re a charity so we’re not selling stuff, we’re not taking commission.

Some of the featured artists line up with Hetain Patel at the press launch of Come As You Really Are. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

VS: What has been the biggest surprise or revelation in this project?

HP: I think how humble everyone has been. Most people are not doing their thing because they think they’re the bee’s knees. And they’re surprised when someone sees them as talented or extraordinary. They’re just doing it because they love doing it. It almost doesn’t matter what they’re making, if they’re into it, you get into it. It’s infectious. The other thing that’s beautiful is people’s excitement about being put with other hobbyists. I worried about that at the beginning: what if people don’t want to be seen that way? But we have been trying as a team to keep remembering what’s important to them, to respect the things that are shown, so they can feel proud of it, and of the show.

VS: You have said you have been putting in 80-hour weeks over the last few months, what with the film, the car and this installation. Is it going to be a relief or a loss when this installation is finished?

HP: Yeah, I think I’ll have withdrawals – it’s that more than relief, to be honest.

• Hetain Patel: Come As You Really Are, presented by Artangel, is at Grants, Croydon until 20 October 2024. From February 2025, it will continue with presentations at partner venues across the UK, from Leeds to St Ives, culminating in a presentation in Factory International’s studios in Manchester, from January to February 2026.