On Moving Early

I have never had much patience for waiting.

Not in life, and certainly not in the art world, where waiting is often framed as wisdom. There is an expectation that collectors should take their time, observe, defer, and eventually arrive once consensus has settled. I have never found that particularly convincing.

By the time consensus forms, value has already moved.

My approach to collecting has always been shaped by this. I am financially literate to understand that timing matters, but also close enough to the work itself to know that cultural weight rarely announces itself clearly. It accumulates slowly, often invisibly, and then all at once. The role of the collector, as I see it, is to recognise that accumulation early and act on it with conviction.

That is not the same as acting recklessly. It requires discipline. It requires being unforgiving.

I am quite hard on the work I buy. If something doesn’t hold up under pressure, I lose interest quickly. I am not interested in politeness in collecting, nor in acquiring things that require too much explanation to justify their presence. The works I live with need to sustain attention, to resist simplification, and to continue revealing themselves over time.

This extends to how I think about access. Through my work with V21 Artspace, I spend a great deal of time considering how art is encountered. Digital infrastructure is often dismissed as secondary, but I see it as fundamental. How a work is seen, studied and returned to, will shape how it is understood in the long term. Access is not neutral. It is one of the primary mechanisms through which cultural history is formed.

Collecting, then, is not just about ownership. It is about positioning. It is about understanding where attention will settle, and why.

I have also never been persuaded by the romanticism surrounding the cash-only buyer. There is a mythology of purity in collecting that suggests seriousness is tied to how something is paid for. In reality, most significant collections have been built with some form of leverage, whether acknowledged or not. If you understand the numbers, debt is not recklessness. It is velocity.

What is often framed as risk is, in many cases, simply timing.

For my generation, this becomes even more acute. We have inherited structures that no longer function as they once did. Economically, socially and culturally, the ground has shifted. Stability, in the traditional sense, is increasingly difficult to rely on, and the pathways that once existed are no longer guaranteed.

In that context, risk stops being optional.

It is easy to characterise younger collectors and entrepreneurs as impatient, or overly aggressive in their approach. I see it differently. When the conditions around you are unstable, moving quickly is not indulgent. It is adaptive. It is a way of navigating a landscape that does not reward passivity.

There is, ultimately, no real option not to take risks. The alternative is not safety. It is stagnation.

That need to adapt and move quickly is largely a reaction to where I started.

I grew up in suburbia, in an environment that was not hostile, but subtly defining. It was shaped by what Nan Goldin described as the “deadening grip” of suburbia.

Conformity was not enforced directly, but it was embedded in the atmosphere. You learned where the boundaries were, and how to move within them.

I love my parents very much, and I recognise that they have been shaped by a system in which those expectations were normalised, even necessary. But I also associate that environment with a certain restraint of identity, particularly in relation to being queer. It was not something that could fully exist in the open. It was negotiated, softened, or held back.

Over time, that becomes difficult to sustain.

Living more congruently now, there is a clarity in recognising that it is not a world I can return to. Not out of rejection, but out of incompatibility. The version of myself that fits comfortably within that framework is not the one I want to carry forward.

Art has become a way of working through that, not by resolving it, but by giving it form.

What is less often discussed is that, for me, this is not a status exercise. Listing names, however established, has never been the point.

The collection brings together voices that sit in conversation across time. Louise Bourgeois, Phyllida Barlow and Glenn Ligon hold one kind of psychological and material weight. Victor Pasmore, Georg Baselitz, Lucian Freud and Marion Adnams offer another. Alongside them, artists such as Sutapa Biswas, Dana Schutz, Ella Kruglyanskaya and Tai Shani introduce different tensions, different urgencies.

I am not assembling a hierarchy. I am building a field of dialogue.

The works I am drawn to tend to carry a kind of emotional density. They are not always resolved. They sit with uncertainty, with fragility, with the sense that things could shift or fall apart. That feels closer to how I experience the world. Not stable, not fixed, but contingent, delicate, and constantly in motion.

Collecting, in that sense, is inward as much as outward. It is a way of building something that can hold uncertainty over long periods of time without collapsing into clarity too quickly.

This does not mean abandoning rigour. If anything, it demands more of it. To move early, you have to be precise. To build something that endures, you have to be selective to the point of discomfort. You have to be willing to walk away, to change direction, to refine your position constantly.