Insight 16: When Artwork Reads Like Homewares

I had wanted to make a lamp from plastic waste for years. When I finally made the prototype for Shedding the Light, it looked amazing! I clustered black 3D-printing waste supports around the base of a simple black lamp, turning the waste into a dense, strange landscape while the object remained completely legible as something that belonged in a home. It was useful, sculptural and made from the residue of the technology I was beginning to question through Fragile Futures, the ecological exhibition I was developing around 3D-printing and its waste.

Then I let curatorial thinking talk me out of it.

Every time I raised the possibility of including lamps in Fragile Futures, the same risk returned through general discussion and feedback: curators were likely to read them as homewares or design rather than fine art. I never developed it far enough to give one the opportunity. I could have incorporated more into the work, or spent time arguing that a functional object could still carry artistic inquiry, but I did not want to begin every encounter by defending its category. The prediction felt credible enough that the prototype stopped there.

This was particularly frustrating because homewares was not an accidental place I had wandered into. I had made domestic objects through my bedhead business, my mosaic practice and, more recently, my Gothic line. I call much of that Gothic work homewares quite deliberately because people primarily buy it to live inside a personal aesthetic.

Pic above: Victorian Gothic inspired artwork. Vintage frame with real butterflies.

Some pieces carry interpretive meaning, but that is rarely the first buying criterion. 

People choose them because they love the object, because it suits their home and because they recognise the craftsmanship, creativity, skill and mastery of materials involved. The art-buying public does not suddenly abandon those motivations because something is sold as art. Online art marketplaces are full of work bought for its decorative appeal, and my own audience has repeatedly shown me that the right artwork reaches the person already attuned to its aesthetic world. The collectors who buy my sculptural jellyfish often have strong marine connections or collect ocean-related objects.

Their desire to live with a subject they already care about does not make their response intellectually empty.

No curator had rejected the work; I had anticipated the rejection and acted on it.

Yet I was designing Fragile Futures to appeal to curators, not everyday people. I was moving from a long history of commercially successful homewares into fine art, and the very strengths that had made those objects desirable could now work against me. If something was functional, decorative, highly crafted or immediately imaginable in a lounge room, it risked being assigned to design before its inquiry was considered.

Because that distinction annoyed me so much, I went looking for research around it. Cupchik's distinction between pragmatic and aesthetic modes of viewing was useful, although I resisted the implied hierarchy. The pragmatic viewer considers personal relevance, comfort, suitability and environmental fit; the aesthetic viewer supposedly gives more attention to ambiguity, symbolism and interpretation. But these are not mutually exclusive encounters.

Someone can buy an artwork because it looks wonderful in their lounge room, respect the skill and material intelligence behind it, and continue discovering meaning in it after it comes home.

The study Purchasing Creativity supports that more complicated picture, describing decoration, daily inspiration, emotional resonance, personal memory, authenticity and relationships with artists as overlapping reasons for choosing and continuing to value artwork. It also describes collectors actively curating work within their homes and retelling its stories to other people.

Domestic placement does not end interpretation. 

It can become another part of it.

The institutional research was less comforting. Bourdieu, Becker and DiMaggio each help explain how distinctions between decorative work, design and fine art are socially maintained through cultural exposure, professional networks and institutional legitimacy. Classification can occur independently of artistic labour or intention. In other words, I could argue that my lamp was art all I liked and still watch somebody place it in the wrong mental department before considering what it was doing.

The frustration of the distinction becomes even clearer when I think about Art Nouveau and Art Deco, when furniture, lamps, glass, jewellery and interiors could carry serious artistic status. Homewares did not have to apologise for being useful. Yet the contemporary fine-art hierarchy often treats domestic desirability as suspicious, as though wanting to live with an object automatically weakens its intellectual value. It just feels like modern art-world snobbery.

I was also trying to negotiate the same boundary through Gathered with Care: Brittle Stars, three wall-based sculptural panels developed for the exhibition's opening attraction zone. Their coastal familiarity, pale timber, domestic scale and restrained palettes were deliberate. I wanted the panels to meet viewers through something they might already recognise from their homes without becoming merely decorative.

The unfamiliar deep-sea brittle-star species, specimen-grid arrangement, repeated forms and museum authority were intended to hold the work in another register at the same time. Exhibition changed which register dominated.

At Meeniyan, hung at standard gallery height against a warm wall, the panels moved closer to wallpaper than specimen display. At Yarra Sculpture Gallery, a lower hang, cooler wall and directional lighting restored their shadows, separation and specimen-tray authority. In a staged domestic image, the same work sat comfortably as home décor. Nothing about the panels changed, but the setting influenced whether they read as decoration, museum display or fine art.

That makes Brittle Stars a more useful test than the lamp ever became. The panels approached domestic familiarity without being functional objects, and even then their fine-art reading depended partly on the room doing interpretive work beside them.

Shedding the Light carried the additional burden of being unmistakably a lamp. I believed its function would arrive before anything else had a chance to speak. The prototype remains untested; I accepted the predicted boundary before putting the object in front of the people who maintained it. Perhaps further development would have shifted the balance, or perhaps I would simply have spent months defending a lamp that the art world had already placed somewhere else.

I was not trying to stop the work looking amazing in someone's home. I just didn't want the art world using that as a reason not to see it as art.

More reading: Insight 11: When Is the Audience Right or Wrong?