Snow Dome Divider (Transparent-value) David M. Thomas Feb 2020

The objects we live with are themselves alive. They may seem inanimate, without biological life yet in a biographical sense they are deep repositories of life. When cared for these objects out live their custodians.

The room divider was acquired by my parents in London probably around the time I was born somewhere near 1970. The decision to buy this particular style of room divider may have been informed by ‘the House Book’ that showcases Terence Conran’s philosophy of interior design.  It was most likely purchased from a “Habitat” shop in London around 1970. Conran was inspired by the food writing of Elizabeth David and both introduced England to a European Modernist life-style, with its aesthetic and financial economies. Both may also have had something to do with the popularisation of the term Life Style. Strangely this term seems out of favour at present?

Once purchased the Room Divider became a central part of our families living space, in London, Sydney and then the Blue Mountains. I acquired it when my mother moved from her home in Wentworth Falls to a nearby nursing home where she now lives. My partner Suzanne wanted us to have certain pieces of furniture of my mothers, the room divider, dining table and a set of 1970 Vico Magistretti beechwood dining chairs. The ‘Carimate’ chair is designed by Magistretti in 1959 for a Golf Club in a small city in Lombardy after which the chair takes its name. 

Suzanne spent many hours, days and months re-designing our small weather board home into a much larger modern dwelling that could house our studio, office spaces as well as domestic living areas. Her philosophy in designing the house was to use what was there and continue it in character of a “beach house”. Keeping what we had lived in and loved and modifying it, improving it. The modifications inspired by her research and our shared lives together. The Room Divider represents my contribution. This work actively cares for something that Suzanne and my mother cared about. And to continue work that we did together. 

The function of the room divider is sometimes obviously to divide a space into two. And yet allowing an openness and transparency between the spaces, it can also be storage so hiding things, shelving and display. It’s a domestic multipurpose architecture. 

Modernist design obviously embodies ideologies and as already alluded to these pieces embody my parents desire and their generations ambition to not live the drab grey brown post war existence of their parents. They wished to lead a modern life. The clean white columns and orange draws, pine wood finish speak of freedom. I am astounded that they shipped their furnishings including the divider from England to Australia, imagine doing this with todays equivalents? Why would you? You might not even bother trying to sell them, you’d simply discard them or give them away because they are not worth anything, and you can buy the same thing somewhere else anyway.

I like the word room divider, for me it conjures up what most people mistake for ideology, rather than a set of ideas shared by a group, the expression room divider evokes an opinion that divides a room. It’s always easier to come up with a counter position on a topic than to research, think and develop a system of thought. 

There are numerous examples for the use of furnishings in contemporary art Franz West, Heimo Zobernig, Jillian Mayer, locally Sarah Poulgrain and Erika Scott, for me the most significant is the sculptural and installation practice of Martin Kippenberger. Particularly his use of furnishings in his Peter sculptures and his most well known installation work, “The Happy End to Franz Kafka’s Amerika”. In both situations tables, chairs and shelving are re-imagined, modified or simply appropriated. Objects exist as absurd anthropomorphic riffs on the human and inhuman body, they are psychological and just psycho, and the intersubjective inventiveness endless. The thing however that I particularly absorbed from this research was the idea that these materials and objects are not simply residual of lives that they hold life and through continuing to work with, care for and modify these objects, this life can be unlocked.