Fusion box sculptures, collages, deconstructions, re-assemblages – modernism reconsidered. In homage to the great Surrealist box makers and artists of the 20th century, Joseph Cornell and Leonora Carrington, combining wood, metal, canvas, clay.

Working with metallica, found objects, junk, recycled materials, deconstructed machines of early modernism like typewriters, sound players, slide projectors, cameras, and inspired by Gertrude Stein’s essay Composition As Explanation (1925), this is composition as recombination.

The archaeology of things, everyday objects with deep inner complexities that remain hidden, whose only function is in combination with other things, the idea of a machine, transformation of energy and meaning. Modernist things like modernism itself is an unstable form, now moving on past an industrial base to new materials. Metal itself carries the memories of a passing age. This is not nostalgia but a kind of archaeology of shifted contexts. Patterns in the brain create new orders out of the chaos, indecipherable texts and languages. An abstraction of things.

This project flows on from canvases in my show Moving Heaven and Earth (Syracuse NY 2010) which was about surrealist journeys inside the retina and through the brain into the voids we carry in memory and vision.

Opening by Anne Higham, architect, 6.30pm, 10 May.

Suzanne Bellamy (PhD Univ Sydney) artist and writer, has a background of exhibiting and guest artist positions in the US (SUNY Oswego, Clemson, Smith) and a PhD in Australian/International Modernism. Artwork and text publications in text/image fusion mixed media work, satire and performance projects, modernist writing, Woolf and Stein. The new work “Abstract Machines – Taking apart the Machines of Modernism,” was first presented at Modernist Objects conference Sorbonne/Paris June 2018.

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