The exhibition GABO comprises ten works in total, eight of which are titled GABO i-viii (2022-2023). Two further works, Pulse (2023) and Hull (2026), round out the exhibition.

The GABO i-viii builds on an earlier work, Five Tattings (2022), which took as its reference The D’Oyley Show (1973), a landmark Australian feminist exhibition celebrating domestic crafts, including lacemaking, crochet, and embroidery. That lineage runs through the eight GABO works, made from highly perforated aluminium kitchenware that the artist accumulated over thirty years. Their radiating patterns, amplified by integrated LEDs, hold two visual worlds at once: the delicate geometries of lace and the harder language of industrial form.

The tension between those two worlds is not only aesthetic. It is biographical. The artist’s mother lived aboard the SS Gabo, a ship moored at Berrys Bay on Sydney Harbour in the early twentieth century, where an unlikely community made their lives amid the work of shipbuilding and wrecking. Berrys Bay was also a recurring subject for Australian modernists, including Grace Cossington Smith and Roland Wakelin, who were drawn to its industrial harbour landscape. Inside that landscape, the artist’s grandmother, Mrs Nielsen, hung lace curtains across the portholes of a home that was slowly being taken apart around her.

It is the elusive image of spherical windows veiled by filigreed fabric that informs Marcus’s GABO i-viii, the motif is multiplied and geometricised in metal, transforming everyday kitchen utensils into intricate, lace-like wall sculptures.

Just as the industrial harbour landscape of Berrys Bay drew Australian modernist painters in the early twentieth century, Marcus mines this layered terrain – personal, historical, and material – to produce compositions that expand both spatially and conceptually. GABO stands as a fitting distillation of Marcus’s practice, drawing together its different strands into a single exhibition. Modernity, modularity and the domestic sphere are its chief concerns. Her artworks are made up of modules drawn from her extensive collection of aluminium kitchenware, once a common feature of the modern Australian home, now increasingly rare. Their original uses are recalled and extended through assemblage, as they are combined into modernist grids. Recognised as one of Australia’s preeminent artists working in assemblage, Marcus draws viewers into a world at once intimate and historical, where the familiar is made strange and luminous through the patient accumulation of objects and memory.

Where GABO i-viii are lit from within by integrated LEDs, Pulse and Hull are assembled from bowls, cups and tins, their colour drawn from the natural patina of aged aluminium rather than from light. Pulse is a rounded form pulsing green. Hull, by contrast, is a strong orange gold, its modernist grid resolving into a hard rectangle.

GABO is Donna Marcus’s second solo exhibition with Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, following Pallet in 2024.

Donna Marcus’s sculptures evoke sounds: the crash of cymbals, the crunch of defunct cars being compressed, the clatter of steel chains rattling onto a ship’s deck. The effect is produced by the tactile quality of the aluminium objects she manipulates, which suggest the mechanical (and musical) processes through which they were forged, as well as their narrowly averted fate as scrap metal. In her hands, the patina of old cake tins and pressure cooker parts sing new tunes. What is at play is a kind of alchemy, a magic act in which the dinted and dented, the scratched and the scoured assume new life. Marcus is a conjurer, and her skill with her materials is the stuff of miracles.

Present are the discarded alloy kitchen utensils that have become her stock-in-trade, amassed over a lifetime from pre-loved shops and reformed as homages to modernist art and design. Distinct is the biographical undercurrent coursing through the artist’s assembly of these items. Just as their former lives are inscribed into their silvered surfaces, Marcus’s compilation of them carries with it the pentimento of her life, ringing out like the chimes in Kenneth Slessor’s iconic poem Five Bells, which mark both the passage of time and the ineffability of memory.

The reference is evident in GABO, initially a collection of five assemblages and now expanded into what feels like an inevitable octet. For Marcus, her carefully collated detritus speaks of her mother’s family of ship salvagers and their lives on board the SS Gabo, their home for several years from 1929 before the ship was stripped of her reusable parts, commandeered as a coal hulk and then sunk in 1933, 20 miles off Sydney Heads.

The light that seeps through perforations machined through aluminium sheets designed as sieves and other consumables, carries with it stories of a nautical life similar to the one enjoyed by Charles Dickens’s beloved protagonist David Copperfield, who for a brief and blessed period lived with his dear nurse Peggotty and her brother’s family aboard a superannuated boat. The ‘Aladdin’s palace’ in Dickens’s tale, was ‘a real boat which had no doubt been upon the waters hundreds of times, and which had never been intended to be lived in’ but was ‘the perfect abode’. The story recalls the account that Marcus treasures of her mother Thora’s childhood on the Gabo that was published in The Sun, Sydney, on 14 July 1929, ‘Men who live by smashing up the happy home’:

In every bay of Sydney Harbour where there is quiet water for mooring, lie old ships which will be put to sea no more – ships whose only value is the timber and iron of which they are made, and the temporary homes which they provide for caretakers, ship-breakers, or their wives.

Illustrated with images of two-and-a-half year-old Thora playing with one of the ship’s kittens, her mother cooking, a waterside worker cutting up the ship’s boilers with an oxy-acetylene torch, and the passengers’ dining saloon repurposed as the family’s living quarters, the article paints a picture of an idyllic if unconventional life on ‘the old Gabo, which after over 40 years’ coastal service, now swings her rusty anchor-chains in Berry’s Bay, North Sydney.’ Of particular appeal, in the columnist’s eyes, are the lace curtains that beautify the portholes and add ‘a woman’s touch’.

It is this elusive image of spherical windows veiled by filigreed fabric that informs Marcus’s GABO, in which the motif is multiplied and geometricised in metal. We are simultaneously transfixed and transported by the vision, our own reminiscences mingling with the artist’s and the ones we might imagine for the original owners of the humble, multicoloured kitchen implements that are her ‘pigments’.

Her comforting and sophisticated assemblages activate our nostalgia for the smell of home cooked food and picnics baskets stocked with anodised aluminium cups that look good enough to eat. The synaesthetic qualities of the sculptures, steeped in the past and deftly ‘scored’ like pieces of music, ricochet around them and quicken our senses. Donna Marcus’s alchemy is to take these interconnected elements and weave them into compositions that expand both spatially and conceptually. In their presence, we marvel at the familiar made new, and grasp at memories just within reach.