Parlour Parlëur was a 71-meter floor to ceiling continuous room conceived of as a partial ruin. Ruins as a category of image inhabit a special place in the romantic imagination as they look concurrently backwards and forwards from a point in the continuous present. Parlour Parlëur was magicked into being out of 3,276 sheets of 80 gsm, recycled A4 paper applied over two weeks beginning in the last week of August. It was exhibited in the main gallery of Penrith Regional Gallery from September 9th to December 10th 2023.

It incorporated elements as diverse as the first (know) portrait bust of an Australian woman (Sarah Wentworth) borrowed from the collection of the Museums of History of New South Wales, modernist and contemporary furniture including Sam Whiteman’s celebrated Tree Lamp (2018), paintings by noted modernist artist Margot Lewers, Lace work produced by the OWLS (Outer Western Sydney Lace Makers) and art works we had produced going back to 1999. These were all embedded non-hierarchically in the multi-perspectival, illusionistic parlour the differences between them in cultural status and material value abrogated by the spatial equilibrium of the Parlour’s optically dazzling interior.