What is in a shopping list?

I thought my obsession was a private one? I thought I was the only one! but it turns out I am not! I collect shopping lists.

I use them to create my paintings. I find them as little secrets discarded from the author often found outside supermarkets.

They are shopping lists………poetry of the everyday.

Lucy Ireland Gray is also obsessed by them too, she started collecting them in 2016 and now has a show called Aide-Mémoire at the Museum of Brands in London.

Gray is an archaeology graduate and half-jokes that her eccentric hobby is itself a form of archaeology: “It is a similar process: finding a thrown-away artefact and building a picture from it.” She finds them mostly on the ground, often with a footprint, but also in baskets, trolleys or on shop shelves. She recently spotted one that had been carefully folded up into a tiny square and shoved in a hole in some brickwork opposite a Waitrose………….There’s something voyeuristically fascinating about these private documents. “You’d never go up to the conveyor belt and poke around in someone’s haul but they happily leave their list behind, which is essentially the same thing. They’re intimate, especially ones with personal notes to the shopper: ‘LOVE! Lots of this’ or ‘Love you millions, mumma.’

Lucy Ireland Gray The Guardian