Artist Sells Possessions for £1

Never mind the New Year’s resolution to clean the house a bit more often. British artist Sara Burden has decided to start 2010 with a house that’s cleaned out – by selling everything she owns for £1.

And she means everything: grandmother’s jewelry, VW Polo car, artwork – and yes, things like cotton buds. (But not, she notes, her four-year-old son, her goldfish – or her kitchen knives, which she's leaving out because English law bars the selling of those on online auction sites such as eBay.)

"My life has sometimes felt empty, void of anything important," she writes on her Web site. "I look around at what I have got to show for my life. Material objects, a vast collection of CDs. What does all of this mean? Fire, flood or thieves could rob me of all of my belongings, but I would still be alive and I would still be me. I would be surrounded by the important things, love and life itself."

Burden – the first artist to go naked on the Plinth Project, in London's Trafalgar Square – is selling 40,000 of her posessions. How it works: Prospective buyers register on Burden’s Web site. When the project ends Dec. 31, she’ll send an invoice for £1 plus postage fees. Should the buyer pay, he or she will receive a package. It could be the car. It could also be the cotton buds.

What determines who gets what? Luck. Burden, 31, has numbered all of her possessions. If you’re the 3rd person to register, you receive item 3. If you’re the 417th, you get No. 417.

"It's my job as an artist to continue to be creative. I'm not doing it for the money -- if I was, I'd be selling everything for £10," Burden told the UK's Daily Mail. "I'm hoping that by the end of the year I'll have nothing left and can start the New Year afresh. But it's not about a new start. People get used to having all their possessions around them and it defines their way of living. I want to see what it's like to not to have them. Life is about experiences not having things."

Of course, Burden is documenting the experience. (She is an artist, after all.)

Burden told the Mail: “Who knows what will happen.”

Well, we certainly can predict several days at the post office…

Photo courtesy of grapefruitmoon via Flickr.