Making as play: Lynda Roberts and Ceri Hann in action.

This is an ongoing self-initiated project, inspired by weekly visits to the Rotary Sunday Market – a flea market located within a car park in suburban Camberwell. Running for over thirty years, the market has become an institution for anyone selling and/or looking for the strange, the bargain or the collectors item. It has also become a social hub for a diverse cross section of the community.

The market has provided a regular venue and context to collaborate with friend and colleague Ceri Hann – a Melbourne based sound and public arts practitioner. It also provided a constant in terms of location and conditions (with the exception of the weather), to source materials, make and draw on complimentary social processes already underway within the market, engaging with this community beyond being a fossicker.

While drawing on the notion of play / make in public spaces from other projects, this project has both reinforced my methodology in terms of sourcing and collating of raw materials, but also assisted in developing new methods in the creation of temporal environments where people could feel inspired to source and/ or make their own pieces. I found that the use of humour also goes a long way here – as does working with and subverting the familiar (like our shopping trolley studio).

The most influential aspect of this project was exploring the dynamic between the temporal and the constant. By working outside my area of making expertise and assembling wearables that would only last a few weeks, the project initially pushed against my architectural sensibilities of making an exquisite object and instead shifted the focus to simply exploring the way an object could embody an idea and mediate a conversation. This opened up a new understanding – devaluing the physical object and valuing instead the ephemeral event shared by maker / observer; seller / buyer.

The project provided an opportunity to work on a range of scales – from the assembly of small objects as if they were small 1:1 models to be worn on or near the body, to utilising the object as a mediator for conversation, to the establishment of a broader social network – pieces providing a mode of interconnection between wearers – moving far beyond the physical space of the marketplace. In this way, the ‘Public Assembly’ project became part of the community of temporal market stall holders while creating a new community of people wearing our jewellery pieces.

“My favourite stall is run by two artists called Public Assembly. They scour the market for objects that spark their imagination, then transform what they’ve found into the contents of their stall. There are no price tags: purchases are by donation. What happens here encapsulates the spirit of the market. There’s improvisation and trust, and the conjuring of marvels from other people’s junk.”

Michelle de Kretser. Odds and endings. The Age. Saturday August 29, 2009