Being Keepers: Survival Aesthetics in Everyday Life at Yarra Sculpture Gallery was conceived not as a fixed installation but as a living process. Over three weeks, the work continued to shift, accumulate and respond. On the first day I laid materials directly on the floor: red Yarn, new and used, the boxes and faded bags that had stored it, beeswax blocks, ceramic tiles from a hard rubbish collection. I set up a working desk for writing and research. My children’s handmade figures sat beside stacks of reference books.
Photographs of the life being kept were coated in beeswax melted on site. Not sealed, but tended. Yarn was washed, dried outside and strung from the street through the entrance into the gallery, marking an autonomous territory. Nothing was explained; life was simply shown. I was no longer seeking permission to exist. This was a Kekkai: not a wall, but a membrane, porous, inhabited, quietly breathing.
