Things Left Behind - Giving Meaning To My Collecting

Collecting is an obsession and also part of my art process. My proposal topic 'Objects and Orphans' is allowing me to look at my collecting habits and use it with more of a discerning eye.
I have noticed that I have to resonate with the object at some sort of emotional level.

Recently I acquired two objects. Both of these have an immense amount of emotion attached to them. One is a chair which is an object from my Mother's house. The other is my Mother in-laws plaits from when she was a young woman.

I am both imagining and emotionally observing  the process of the women who left their babies behind at the Foundling Museum in the 1700's. They left objects known as identifiers ,with their child sometimes as a desperate attempt to maintain a bond and perhaps allow the identity of the child to be known to her should she one day return to reclaim her child.

In holding these objects ( pictured below ) I have and feel a sense of loss, perhaps just as the mothers of these children did, accept my process is in reverse  - I am the 'child'. This is why I collected these particular objects - to connect and maintain a bond.