In 2021, peripatetic curator Sandie Macrae established PostROOM in her home off Essex Road, London, making exhibitions within a functioning domestic space that included the kitchen, dining area and garden shed.
For their solo exhibition Modern Object in November 2022, Dunhill and O’Brien responded to the character of the house and its furniture with a group of new works poised awkwardly between sculpture, furniture and clothing, alongside objects from their own collection and earlier works. Made during an extended period in which circumstances had confined them unusually closely to the studio, these new works developed an alarmingly impractical relationship to the body and to domestic usefulness.
A large upholstered shelving unit, for example, could be worn and carried using backpack-like shoulder straps, although its considerable weight made the proposition an ordeal rather than a convenience. In Shielding, an upholstered form replicating Macrae’s kitchen table could be worn like an oversized shield, but presented on the wall with empty sleeves dangling became more mournful. Elsewhere, matching backpacks were apparently reconfigured into compact modernist sculptures — one pierced by a hole, another equipped with a projecting staff.
The awkward combination of ornament, burden and improbable utility connected the new works to objects and images in Dunhill and O’Brien’s collection. Among them was a nineteenth-century Chinese pith painting depicting a couple confined in a cangue — an image in which clothing, structure and restraint become uneasily entangled.
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From 750 words a week, a blog by art writer Paul O’Kane
“Most of their work reveals a head-on negotiation, not only with each other but with the underlying concepts and context of their duality, their ‘two-ness’ and their collaboration. This includes examination of the way that idea-production, conceptual refinement, design and manufacture all take place in an especially candid and visible arena once artists choose, or are forced to work outside the more private confines of a more typical practice.
Suffice to say that the works of these collaborating artists always provoke intrigue, fascination and amusement while often delivering a special and memorable sense of bathos. Dunhill & O’Brien also demonstrate that much humour tends to derive from such collaboration.”
photography by Andrew Watson