Portia Beacham

Microcosmic Collections interrogates the conventional storage and display sites of domestic dwelling, with focus on the miniature collectable as a poetical mediator between spaces within spaces, interiority and privatisation. The hybrid space of the house-museum acts as a model that re-organises the contents of the home, using modes of curation and staging to create an experience around home storage. Through discovery and revelation, private states of space suddenly become public as they are gradually exposed to an exterior audience. The curious mind is taken on a performative journey into corresponding micro and macro moments; each a reflection upon the social constructs of bourgeois space. Participants are confronted with theatrical scenes of the sensual and the sinister, the dirty and the delightful, bringing highlight to the orderly and disorderly, the enclosed and disclosed. The housed miniature collection becomes a ritualistic organism, immersing viewers in a series of reframed material worlds: distorted yet oddly close to home.