The thesis explores the use of religious themes and the notion of self-design in contemporary art practice. It argues that art today that addresses religion does so primarily for its rhetorical function: for a recognizable pattern of persuasiveness, which is ultimately defined by its established mechanisms of belief. Furthermore, it suggests that it is through an engagement with this secularized rhetoric that the art viewer today can potentially be provoked to re-create oneself in ones own terms; or, in Richard Rorty's terms, to 'revocabularize'.

This practice-based enquiry into United Kingdom based collecting rooms reveals five participants’ motivations, frustrations and satisfactions manifested in the creation of their spaces. Through the examination of theorists and commentators in the distinct but related fields of cultural theory, sociology and art, the thesis proposes that a collector’s past can be witnessed through memories generated by and within the space. The thesis also advances the idea that part of the experience of the space takes place in the present but simultaneously imagines the future. I have constructed spatial portraits using semi-structured interviews, photography and video, which explore the environment of each collector thus gaining insights into individual circumstances and personal situations. Narrative within this enquiry takes three intersecting forms: firstly the account of the construction of each collecting room, which divests objects of their historical origins, replacing these with personal associations or meanings devised by each collector. Secondly, each participants’ re-telling of their narratives and thirdly through the re-presentation of the collectors’ narratives to an audience. The latter brings my agency as an artist into focus. Uniting all three narrative forms, the creative practice intends to produce a metanarrative of each collecting room that further investigates the temporality of the space through the combined use of still photography, video and sound. Constructed from a symbiotic relationship between theory and practice, the research uses a methodology that combines Sensory Ethnography with Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. This methodology explores the idiosyncrasies of each collector, engendering an extensive investigation of the individual collecting spaces. This detailed approach formed and eventually determined the number of participants, resulting in the production of a developmental case study and four original re-presentations that respond to ideas and debates on collecting, material culture and domestic space. These artworks that have been informed by combining existing research methods and constitute my contribution to new knowledge, disclosing ideas and observations which combine narrative and experience not necessarily discernable from theoretical arguments alone.