Merri Cheyne, Emily Simek
Making-do
8
June 2024
8
Jun
2024
Merri Cheyne’s lounge-room, Brunswick East, Wurundjeri Land
Making-do
Merri Cheyne, Emily Simek
8
June 2024
8
June
2024
Merri Cheyne’s lounge-room, Brunswick East, Wurundjeri Land
Making-do is the first exhibition in ‘Hot Compost Home Tour’, a home-based touring exhibition series curated by artists and gardeners in Naarm.
Curated by community gardener and textile practitioner Merri Cheyne, Making-do is an exhibition of a scrap quilt by Emily Simek, alongside Cheyne’s own domestic textiles in her lounge-room. The exhibition takes the format of a working group, where Cheyne invites friends to test out and further develop a pattern for a new blanket made from scrap materials. Pattern-testing is a group process where the design of the blanket, and home-based exhibition, is collectively tested out and reflected upon, through practices in making and doing.
The show explores how a home show might function in support of a household, ‘making-do’ in ways that are subsistent, frugal, and involve collective gestures of care. This reflects Cheyne’s approach to gardening and low impact living,
…when I don’t have something, I’ve just got to adjust my expectations of what I need, I can just do without. You make-do with what you have, or you wait until the opportunity manifests itself – something on the street, in the op-shop, or someone gives it to you. Stuff does manifest, people do give you things you really really want, if you wait long enough, if you are patient. It’s about tamping down your desire for new stuff, thinking, is it really necessary?
———
Hot Compost Home Tour is an off-site exhibition series by Emily Simek in collaboration with Merri Cheyne, Anna Dunnill, Eric Jong, Mei Sun and Doug Webb. The home-based tour explores composting as an approach to exhibition practice. Using relational ethics as a framework, the project considers the conditions of the various exchanges that ‘create’ compost: how and where does it come to exist? How are different collaborators implicated? Instead of a purely material process, composting becomes about the work of relationships within systems of exchange.
This project is supported by a VCA50 Creative Development Grant, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne.
The tour will continue in July with a forthcoming exhibition curated by Eric Jong.
Photography by Astrid Mulder.
Making-do is the first exhibition in ‘Hot Compost Home Tour’, a home-based touring exhibition series curated by artists and gardeners in Naarm.
Curated by community gardener and textile practitioner Merri Cheyne, Making-do is an exhibition of a scrap quilt by Emily Simek, alongside Cheyne’s own domestic textiles in her lounge-room. The exhibition takes the format of a working group, where Cheyne invites friends to test out and further develop a pattern for a new blanket made from scrap materials. Pattern-testing is a group process where the design of the blanket, and home-based exhibition, is collectively tested out and reflected upon, through practices in making and doing.
The show explores how a home show might function in support of a household, ‘making-do’ in ways that are subsistent, frugal, and involve collective gestures of care. This reflects Cheyne’s approach to gardening and low impact living,
…when I don’t have something, I’ve just got to adjust my expectations of what I need, I can just do without. You make-do with what you have, or you wait until the opportunity manifests itself – something on the street, in the op-shop, or someone gives it to you. Stuff does manifest, people do give you things you really really want, if you wait long enough, if you are patient. It’s about tamping down your desire for new stuff, thinking, is it really necessary?
———
Hot Compost Home Tour is an off-site exhibition series by Emily Simek in collaboration with Merri Cheyne, Anna Dunnill, Eric Jong, Mei Sun and Doug Webb. The home-based tour explores composting as an approach to exhibition practice. Using relational ethics as a framework, the project considers the conditions of the various exchanges that ‘create’ compost: how and where does it come to exist? How are different collaborators implicated? Instead of a purely material process, composting becomes about the work of relationships within systems of exchange.
This project is supported by a VCA50 Creative Development Grant, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne.
Emily Simek
Emily Simek uses a practice in digital art, textiles, installation, writing and gardening to explore the conditions that sustain ecologies. Her practice explores relationships within food webs, and intersects with community gardening and social practices. She is a caretaker of a worm farm compost system, and contributor to Patch-Work, a collaborative project on Wurundjeri Land at Joe’s Market Garden, Coburg.