House Of Oddments
House of Oddments
House of Oddments is an evolving antique and fine art project by artist and author Spencer Sheehan Kalina, exploring the relationship between collecting, domestic life, craftsmanship, memory, and the stories carried by objects.
Operating both online and through intimate, appointment-based viewing rooms within Spencer’s residences, House of Oddments approaches the antique and art shop as an extension of his curatorial practice. Each object is selected not simply for its age, monetary value, or provenance, but for its particular character, beauty, strangeness, craftsmanship, history, or capacity to inspire curiosity.
The project begins with a focused collection of antique, vintage, unique, and handmade ceramic mugs—humble domestic vessels that become, through careful looking, objects of design, craft, cultural history, and personal significance. Each piece is considered individually, catalogued and presented as part of an ever-changing collection.
Rather than functioning solely as a place to purchase things, House of Oddments is intended as a place to encounter them: a small, living collection in which art, antiques, curiosities, and everyday objects are brought into conversation with one another. Objects may be acquired, exhibited, researched, written about, lived alongside, and ultimately placed into new private collections.
Over time, House of Oddments will expand beyond ceramics to encompass fine art, folk art, decorative objects, books, ephemera, textiles, sculpture, and other remarkable oddments encountered along the way.
House of Oddments is, at its heart, a practice of finding beauty in the overlooked and giving interesting things another life.
Curatorial Statement
House of Oddments considers the act of collecting as a creative and curatorial practice.
The project begins with a simple premise: that objects do not cease to have meaning when they leave the hands of their makers, nor does their significance depend entirely upon their monetary or historical importance. A chipped cup, an anonymous piece of studio pottery, a peculiar piece of folk art, or an otherwise unremarkable domestic object may acquire significance through use, memory, association, craftsmanship, circumstance, and the attentive gaze of another person.
Within House of Oddments, the distinction between art object, antique, craft, collectible, domestic object, and curiosity is intentionally porous. Rather than establishing a hierarchy between these categories, the project places them into conversation. Objects are selected according to an intuitive and evolving curatorial sensibility—one that values beauty alongside strangeness, craftsmanship alongside imperfection, provenance alongside mystery, and cultural significance alongside personal response.
The residence becomes an important component of this practice. By situating the collection within domestic spaces rather than a conventional gallery or commercial storefront, House of Oddments collapses the boundaries between home, collection, exhibition, archive, studio, and marketplace. Objects are encountered not as isolated commodities but within an environment that suggests how they might be lived with, used, remembered, and incorporated into the intimate rituals of everyday life.
The project’s inaugural focus on ceramic mugs is deliberate. The mug is among the most ordinary objects in domestic life, yet it carries an extraordinary range of histories. It can be a vessel, a souvenir, a handmade artifact, a record of a particular period of design, an expression of a maker's hand, or an intimate object associated with a person, place, or moment. By concentrating initially on such a familiar form, House of Oddments asks what happens when sustained attention is given to something ordinarily overlooked.
Each acquisition therefore becomes an act of looking. Each catalogue entry becomes an act of interpretation. Each display becomes an act of contextualization. And each sale becomes an act of release.
Objects enter the House of Oddments collection temporarily. They may be researched, photographed, exhibited, written about, lived alongside, and eventually placed into another collection. Their departure does not conclude their story; it becomes another chapter in their circulation through the world. The archive of the project consequently records not only what remains, but also what has passed through.
In this sense, House of Oddments is less concerned with accumulation than with encounter. It asks what we choose to preserve, why certain objects attract our attention, how value is constructed, and what happens when an everyday thing is looked at long enough to become extraordinary.
House of Oddments is an ongoing curatorial experiment in attention, acquisition, arrangement, interpretation, and release—a collection without a fixed endpoint, in which the overlooked may become worthy of looking at again.