Small Packages
The increasingly globalised world. Movement of people, ideas and commodities between countries and cultures become a necessity, a currency, a tourism – in constant flux. Asia as our neighbour/Asias as our neighbours.

Julie Shiels makes an installation which examines some of the complexities of these interactions

Cross pollination that can be both
Acknowledged and unacknowledged
Enriching and contaminating
Personal and societal.

Travellers take/exchange small packages of information, currency, opinions, microbes- represented here by airline sickness bags. Collected and arranged as repeating units or colour patches, they become the scaffold for the art work. These small bags make their journey repeatedly, often untouched, always as a reassuring presence to the passenger and a gentle reminder of the possibility of disease/disruption/contamination: a metaphor which extends across cultural, social, political, economic and even bacterial spheres.

The airline codes function as a system of ciphers that rely on being universally decipherable. They could be understood as a new world language, which facilitates and directs transfer. A language of global movement. Everyday. Almost everywhere.

We are initiates. Globalisation demands literacy in new languages- part alphabet/part word/part sign/ part code. Negotiations beyond the interfaces of cultures we visit or receive requires continual expansion of this literacy and understanding into a different context, even to read a street sign.

The ground of the white rice is so familiar to Australian tables that we almost taste it as we look. The Asian staple of the rice bowls, cuisines and economies: a fundamental association for us. Planted, harvested, cleaned and polished. A vehicle of trade and exchange.

So here we observe these small packages arranged on an imagined continent of rice beside the created language of airport codes. And let’s consider the promise of movement, the lure of exchange, the complexity of the emergent globalised world.

Jane Keech

Exhibited at Grey Area – 4th – 14th March 1998

Exhibition Dates
Tuesday August 29 – Saturday September 16 2006
Tuesday – Friday: 11am – 5pm
Saturday: 12pm – 4pm

Exhibition to be launched by Jon Cattapan

I was stencilling stories onto dumped mattresses in the streets of St Kilda when the fabric on their covers caught my eye. A whole history of textile design was going off to the tip. They were too gorgeous to stencil, too precious to leave. So I started collecting mattresses, piling them onto the roof of my car and taking them home. As the garage began to overflow I wondered what to do next. I wanted to give these mattresses another life.

I started sewing pyjamas, carefully cutting each garment to fit the cloth avoiding the blemishes where possible but retaining the intimate history. The pyjamas draw our gaze and invite our touch. But as they attract, they also repel, because of their past, their proximity to the skin of a person or persons unknown. They embody someone else’s story but prompt the question “how do you sleep?”

(installation detail: plaster castes made from plastic packaging)

A collection of unidentified objects hover on the wall. The forms are strange but somehow familiar. They look almost like museum pieces, specimens from some lost civilisation or perhaps even from another world altogether. Yet they are recognisably the product of our commercial, industrial age.

Just passing through
fortyfive downstairs
45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
November 13 – December 8, 2007.
Tuesday – Friday 11 – 5pm
Saturday 12 – 4pm

During 2007, I’ve been walking the streets of the CBD, observing life as a ‘botanist of the pavement’ and collecting discarded items that can be re-purposed – like the plastic packaging used to cast the objects in this show, and flattened cardboard boxes. The boxes are stencilled and then returned to the piles of flattened cardboard stacked on the street for recycling.

Every object has a story.

They flock together – patterns across the wall: a collection of objects cast from the empty spaces left behind in plastic packaging. Sourced from the tool box, the toy box and the domestic environment, the original moulds are the wallpaper of our daily lives – ever present but barely noticed.

23 July – 2 August 2008

Opened by Julian Birnside

Flock: Catalogue essay by Marian Crawford

Photos: Katie Tremschnig

Monash Gallery of Art, 1 April 2009 – 10 May, 2009

Sleeper, Julie Shiels’ new exhibition at Monash Gallery of Art is the culmination of a four-year project in which she has used discarded mattresses found on the streets of Melbourne as source material for her art.

The mattresses are used in a range of ways. Shiels fashions pyjamas from the upholstery, documents the array of weapons found secreted in the stuffing, photographs a mattress recycle yard and in the series Bedtime stories binds their ornate fabrics into artist’s books.

In his catalogue essay Jason Smith, Director of Heide Museum of Modern Art states ‘ Sleeper reminds us why artists undertake the mysterious, compulsive acts they do to externalise their visions and contemplations of the world we inhabit: they tell us it is necessary to look again, to not deny some of the terrors of the everyday, and to see strange beauty and seek solace in some simple (and not so simple) things. Jason Smith, Sleeper, catalogue essay, 2009.

Image credits: John Brash

In today’s world of mass-production, anonymous spectacle and gleaming, sterile surfaces, it has become increasingly difficult to leave traces. Rye Dag Holmboe

The objects in this exhibition trace the shape, form & three-dimensional memory of once brand new products by casting the space in discarded plastic packaging. The installation materialises absence via a proposition that these empty spaces and their shadows can be metaphor and philosophical illustration of the forces that underlie the historical processes of social change and progress. These forces inevitably embody both utopian ideals and apocalyptic threats.

Working with the packaging that once held mass-produced consumer goods, objects are cast and silhouettes are formed as large-scale vinyl printouts. In Trace #2, the residues of consumption articulate various ideas about technology, the ingenuity of contemporary design, obsolescence and the industrial and economic processes that drive consumption.

Through the reinterpretation and arrangement of these cast voids, the printing of decorative forms, and the forming of collections, these abandoned spaces become the frame within which, the trace is reasserted.

March 31 – May 6, 2012:  Linden – Centre of Contemporary Arts  – 26 Acland St, St Kilda, Victoria

Trace, index, casting, sculpture, absence

The psychology of consumption is dominated by repeated attempts to create internal meaning, satisfaction and a sense of self through the acquisition of external things.This series of works reproduces the empty spaces left when domestic consumables are removed from their plastic packages to explore the experience of consumption and reflect upon the emotions it evokes. Unlike most artworks using ‘readymades’, this work is derived from discarded space rather than discarded objects. It takes advantage of the already abstracted form of the package that once held a recognisable household item.

This exhibition presents different iterations of this ‘readymade’ space using a range of materials including loose plaster, aluminium and light – used as a ‘material’ to create photographic imprints or photograms.

Objects 1 – 10 Silver gelatin prints on fibre-based paper 120 x 100 cms

Material Affect catalogue