Just passing through

Just passing through, Julie Shiels (2007)
Just passing through, Julie Shiels (2007)
Just passing through, Julie Shiels (2007)
Just passing through, Julie Shiels (2007)
Just passing through, Julie Shiels (2007)

(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.