Shopping Lists: A Consuming Fascination

by 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.

256 pages, Hardcover

Published September 14, 2023

Reviews

[Keen Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars!

The edition I read of this isn't up yet, so we'll settle for this one...

“The shopping list collector is someone with an innate curiosity for the lives of others.”

Shame on me, as I looked at these I was horrified by how shabby the handwriting was and how consistently bad the spelling was too. Especially considering these lists were taken exclusively from an upmarket supermarket, where I imagine that the vast majority of the patrons are professional middle-classes, (often known in some media circles as the metropolitan elite) and yet the spelling was shocking…

I remember seeing a similar shopping list project at a gallery down in Christchurch over the festive period, where a Kiwi woman had done a similar thing but during the lockdown in New Zealand. Although it may actually have been this same woman?...

This does give an interesting insight into the purchasing habits of a narrow strata of society, and Swenson provides some interesting commentary too, offering some explanations and origins into the habit of collecting ephemera, like she done with this, which made for enjoyable reading.

I wonder if she's planning a follow-up companion piece, but this time going to a deprived area of the same city to focus exclusively on a cheap, discount supermarket...now the contrast in results would make for genuinely compelling reading...

[Selma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Als mens met een verzameling boodschappenlijstjes is dit natuurlijk een fantastisch boek

[Jane McGlinchey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good for a collection of shopping lists.