Domestic occupation

RESEARCH BACKGROUND: Contemporary Site Investigations (CSI) Flinders Street was commissioned by the City of Melbourne as part of their Public Art Grant Program. Six artists were granted unprecedented access to dormant spaces within Australia's busiest station - Flinders Street. They spent a month working there. For 'Domestic Occupation' Carey occupied Room 244, a former mail room and uniform depot on the station's second floor. For five years, the space had been a dumping ground for objects past their use-by date. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: In 'Domestic Occupation' Carey archived Room 244. He painstakingly categorized and filed discarded office materials and so created intricate wunderkammers of railway workers' pasts within the room's pigeon-hole cabinets. This cataloguing honoured the past lives of these objects and the people who used them, thus reanimating the abandoned and discarded. Carey also reshaped dust and vacuumed detritus to create monumental 'dust paintings', large-scale, ephemeral abstract compositions that rendered the [im]material and exposed the unseen, proposing new poetic and practical uses for abandoned sites, objects and materials. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: 'Domestic Occupation' was a major public artwork funded by City of Melbourne, the Victorian Government, Federation Square and others. The project was exhibited at Federation Square on 19 October and footage of the artists' work, was screened there over that weekend to thousands of viewers. Significant media coverage further demonstrated the work's value. A four-minute film, 'Inside Flinders Street Station: The Mailroom' - on 'Domestic Occupation' - was published on 'The Age's website on 15 October. See, also: 'The Age', (John Bailey, 'Ball may be over but there's life in the old girl yet', 14 October 2012); 'Architecture Australia' (Peter Salhani, 'Flinders Street Station speaks' 19 October 2012), ABC Arts 'Out and About' blog (26 October 2012) and the Culture Victoria blog (30 October 2012)