These sites are all unified in some ways by the fact that they are public sites, places shared by other family members, close friends, sometimes even strangers. But there is one place which remains a much more private repository. The shed at the bottom of the garden is home to a different kind of collection - usually the discards from domestic life - car and bike parts, broken furniture, old toys, pieces of wood, empty plant pots. But what marks these as different is that they have been judged not rubbish, they have been carefully garnered, waiting for time, inspiration, the right moment to rework them into something new ...

Anne Neil and Steve Tepper have previously held solo exhibitions at the Fremantle Arts Centre (1992 & 1993 respectively); House and Home is their first joint exhibition here. While the work on show has strong ties to their ongoing artistic practice, the impetus for the work itself can be tied directly to the work they undertook in Basel, Switzerland, in 1994 when Anne Neil and Steve Tepper spent six months there as exchange artists. Being away from 'home' both artists were intrigued by the notion of how we act on spaces to make them ours. What is it that we do to make a house, a studio, a shed, home? In their case it was to start to collect objects which they had selected as having particular, personal appeal. Allied to this was the need to continue an artistic practice with little by way of 'proper' artistic materials to hand but a great richness of discarded material, mostly in the form of outmoded objects.

This reworking of pre-existing objects runs throughout Anne Neil and Steve Tepper's approach in House and Home. In many ways the act of assemblage, the making of the new from the old, is about protection and loss. The objects chosen will never function again as they once did, yet they are preserved, they do not completely disappear. A kind of taxidermy is practised whereby life is returned to the dead but, unlike the semblance of life offered the mammal or reptile in the museum's practice, these really do have a new life while retaining the aura of the old. They are the same yet they are different. This is probably clearest with Steve Tepper's lights, and is underscored by their delightful thematic unity. No Fishing combines a fishing rod with a sardine tin which is used both as the shade for the light and as the mould for the light's base plate.

Tied up with many of these works is a nostalgia for disappearing objects. By their very nature as salvaged objects they mostly exhibit the appeal of design from a different epoch. They again become museum-like, in this case as an archive, much as the shed is often an archive of family histories bound up in objects. How many of us are still familiar with the original functioning of the laundry coppers in Anne Neil's Wash Tower 1 & 2 from direct experience? Those most familiar with the electrical conduit and junction box used by Steve Tepper in Conduit are probably the home renovators who are busily replacing them these days.

This preservation and loss is reversed in Anne Neil's Earth to Earth 2 installation in the garden bed outside the Print Gallery. The forest of bound and charred jarrah 'Windsor' fence pickets are a clear symbol of containment, of our protection of hearth and home, yet they also speak of the loss of the jarrah forests of the South-West. The fact that the design of the pickets is 'Windsor' highlights the impact on the landscape of colonisation and European settlement.

While Earth to Earth 2 is clearly an outside piece in its direct reference to the landscape it speaks of interior spaces (physical and psychological). All aspects of these interior spaces are explored in the works in this exhibition. Anne Neil's Offerings combines the wax of Christian ritual (candles) with the Asian spiritual offering of rice in the invocation of household gods while Help Line makes visual the tensions often present beneath the surface of domestic harmony as the individual feels squeezed by the architecture of the home. Steve Tepper's lights are crafted in the domain usually associated with the male, the shed, yet are to be placed in the 'female' sphere of the  home.

House and Home embodies a search for identity in the present from amongst the discarded. What makes these pieces so evocative is that, by the very virtue of their being remade, there is nothing self-contained about them. They do not risk being mute to an audience who is perhaps unaware of the language and history of the material from which they have been fashioned, because they all speak of something else. There is a flow as one object refers to another - the bike lamp to the full bicycle, the architrave to the building - and all of these refer to the human. The objects acquire their expressiveness by invoking manual actions such as eating, cycling, washing, be they bowls, pumps, laundry coppers, irons, electrical conduit or fishing rods. This approach to the object has turned on its head the principles we normally associate with the crafts, the notion of the designer-maker artisan who works with raw materials to fashion (mostly) utilitarian objects which reflect a unique, personal response both to the material and the intended function of the product (wooden table, ceramic jug, metal jewellery). There is a major difference in the way they work, Steve Tepper works from the object, inspired by the form itself or its patina, while Anne Neil starts from the idea and then seeks the material which can give best expression to that idea.

The starting point for Anne Neil and Steve Tepper's work in House and Home is not a typology of craft design, because they work within the typology of (somebody else's) industrial design.

Theirs are not, initially, the personalised craft object of an individual but become individuated through reworking the discards of somebody else's design labours - the found object. What we find through this process are the keys to our own strategies for individuating the spaces in which we live.

Page last updated 30 October, 2001

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