The Order of Things

Artist Wallace Peck creating his work at the Open Door Art Studio, Grandview Ohio USA.

For years I worked as a direct support provider (DSP), supporting people in their daily needs and community engagement. One person I worked with, Gavin, routinely requested we visit spaces filled with directories, indexes, and blue books - government and business listings of names, addresses, and occupations. He gravitated toward lists: orderly presentations of information, whether arranged alphabetically or numerically. These lists were self-contained. They didn’t demand context; they simply offered themselves to be absorbed. He delighted in this kind of information, carefully copying entries into his notebook - not to create something new but to harbor them. To him, each item was whole and complete. 

Over his life, Gavin has accumulated scores of notebooks filled with lists of businesses and occupants across southeast Michigan. In his own way, they were like maps - detailing his surroundings in clear, concrete terms. He wasn’t interested in the decorative, but in information that was precise. His goal was not to interpret or embellish, but to build volumes of information that detailed the world around him in a direct fashion.

In another position, as a facilitating artist in a studio, I worked with a young artist who also worked in lists - though hers took on a different form. Lindsey enjoyed making portraits of celebrities. She would pore over collections of images of her chosen subject until one stood out, then use it as a reference for her drawing. With careful glances back and forth, her portraits became a different kind of accounting - a distillation of the image before her. Soon, her drawings dissolved into parts: noses, mouths, eyes, chins, and cheeks floating across each page. What might look unfinished to someone else was, in fact, a complete catalogue to her. A face, after all, is foremost a collection of parts. If a page included them - two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, hair - then the portrait was complete. Whether the ear landed directly below the chin didn’t matter; what mattered was that the elements were all present.

As facilitators, moments like these remind us that people come into contact with information differently - and that they seek relationships with it differently, too. Some search for narrative, others for order. Some want to interpret and arrange, others to absorb and store. The work of facilitation is not to “correct” these preferences but to recognize them as valid ways of engaging with the world. Gavin’s joy in lists, and Lindsey’s excitement in accumulation, each reveal that creativity and meaning can emerge from the simple act of encountering and recording information in the form that best suits the individual.

When we attend to these preferences, we open pathways. A list can become art. A catalogue can become expression. And what looks like mere order can be the very thing that allows discovery to unfold.