Drawn Home

The Fitzroy Gardens awaits the return of objects collected, stolen, forgotten, doubted, or misunderstood. The garden is marked by mislaid artefacts: a home from elsewhere, the memory of plaster replicas, infrastructure never realised, and the Indigenous landscape that once was. The garden describes the problem of repatriated objects that can find no end point to their journey, unable to recover a home, and that maintain in perpetuity what is lost.  And so they lie in response. 

A collection of buildings is held within this troubled landscape. A storeroom dedicated to holding an infinite sum of cultural narratives, an archive awaiting the returning gifts, an institution that preserves and develops cultural integrity, and the display collecting catalogues of the imagination.  The architecture of each building was an attempt to return what was forgotten, to hold the sum of all the artefacts, so that they may lie in repose against one another.   

This project is caught in the memory of a tiny island between Croatia, Italy and Australia. On the fridge in my grandmother’s kitchen hangs a supermarket list which exposes the difficulty of finding yourself between homes: “bata za kek, kokenac, natmeg, raz, sesmi sid”