First person: 'I sold everything I've ever owned'

Last Christmas, my girlfriend broke up with me. It was one of those times in life when you wake up at 5am, wondering what you are going to do next; above anything else, I felt out of control. At almost exactly the same time, I left the gallery where I'd been working as an artist for many years. It was going to be my 34th birthday two weeks later too, and I suddenly realised that my entire personal and professional life was completely up in the air; it felt like I'd reached an emotional Ground Zero. While on the one hand, I found that rather destabilising, I felt a sense of freedom attached to my new-found situation.

It was a crucial moment in my life, yet I wasn't quite sure where to go next, so in order to find out, I decided to gather together every single possession I owned – without exception – along with every painting I'd ever done, and place these all together in order to see how everything stood. I then planned to put on an exhibition of everything I had, inviting guests to come in, root around my belongings and buy whatever they wanted, with all my paintings for sale at a highly reduced price. It was the scariest and most exciting decision I've ever made in my life. Fundamentally it was an experiment, and I had absolutely no idea what the effect might be.

Over the course of a few days, I enlisted a few friends who helped me work through all my stuff – my clothes, my old toys, letters from friends at primary school and ex-girlfriends, which we stacked into several boxes and started to shift across to the gallery. That in itself was quite a learning curve – it helped me realise that the people who were willing to give up time and help me out were true friends. Once we'd cleaned the place out, my flat was totally empty: no television, no kettle, no soap. The only things I had kept hold of were the clothes I'm wearing now – a pair of trousers, a shirt, a jumper, some pants and a pair of flip flops – plus my wallet, house keys and passport. It was quite a terrifying moment realising that this was all I had left to my name.

Once I arrived at the gallery, where I'd stacked all my old belongings, along with 146 paintings I'd done over the years, in one room, I started noticing things about myself and my work that had never struck me before. In almost all of my paintings, I saw three distinct themes emerging: love and sex, messiness and Nazis. I have a Jewish heritage and I think the three aspects together were about me trying to understand my identity: who I was and where I belong. And that, by extension, is what this change of life has been about; it's been a way of coming to understand who I am as a person, then letting go of that in order to decide where to go next, free of the physical and emotional baggage that I'd collected along the way. It's essentially about creating an environment where I can move forward, literally and metaphorically.

When it came down to it and visitors were filing into the gallery where they'd riffle through my old personal letters and underwear, I suddenly felt every exposed. There was a moment when I thought: "Do I want 200 people coming in here and looking at all my most sacred things?" My parents, meanwhile, were very worried about my mental state. But this was just something I had to do. Finally, I am free and unencumbered by my past. Now that the sale has just come to an end and I have nothing left, I'm going to head off travelling, somewhere where I don't need to think about the things that I've sold. From there, I will start to build my future, piece by piece. I may well regret what I've done at some point down the line, but I like to think that I won't miss my stuff. Any memories I have, I hold in my head. I don't need physical mementoes to remind me of where I've been.