I was thinking about some of the comments I had on the Treasures post about how my children would arrange their stuff and I thought: yeah, ok, but it just looks like a big pile of mess! And then I thought: It’s funny how they don’t distinguish between things of ‘value’ and things which are ‘worthless’; that distinction – of value and worth – is one which society and in turn we as adults make and impress upon them. To them, a gemstone is just as precious as a plastic toy from a magazine, or a shiny sticker, a metal bangle, or a worthless string of glass beads. So I was playing around with ways to juxtapose the imposed order and ‘objects of value’ with the jumble of junk, plastic tat and general disarray which overwhelms any average child’s bedroom – the ‘treasure’ with the ‘trash’ – and I decided to try presenting them in a diptych format, using one of the ‘treasures’ images and also a shot of one of the insides of my daughter’s many treasure boxes. I like the formality and constraint of the diptych layout, but there is a bit of chaos there threatening to burst out.

© images and content Emily Hughes and searchingtosee, 2013