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In Maureen Burns’ Domestic Pulp-itations at the Tin Sheds gallery, domestic objects are scattered around the architecture in an airy commentary on the participation of art and design in the culture of mass production and colonisation. Cups, bowls, coffee tables, lights, bags and banana lounges are carefully strewn across the walls and floor of the gallery, some at eye-height following standard gallery conventions, others seeming to have flown in with some other framework in mind.
To the artist, each object is firstly lovingly collected, and she can tell you the unique history of its arrival and its stay in her collection. The large yellow stencil lamp with armchair and curtain fabric is the only part of this show left over from her past habit of collecting imagery from home magazines. The rest are objects from eBay. The 1960’s boomerang table popped up from Melbourne at a bargain price, with an ‘aboriginalia’ motif as well as the sought-after shape. The ‘Sleeping Mexican’ plaque appealed for its family-sentimental attachments for the artist, but it was also collected because it continued the sub-thematics of exotica in the collection, that had already appeared in the print of an interior with a Mies Van Der Rohe chair and African head sculpture. Sometimes the actual object was not collected, as when, for example, the iconic Featherston webbed relaxation chairs that are far too expensive to actually buy—Grant Featherston being a leading Australian designer in the internationalised Danish style so popular in ’50s and ’60s—it is more practical to just work with the eBay photo. Parts of the collection stay merged with the artist’s life—the orange Bessemer fruit bowl is reportedly in use in her kitchen—but others