Rewind: How not to remember?

Rewind: How not to remember?: Kathy Temin’s Three Indoor Monuments

Andrew Renton’s poetic refrain, ‘How not to remember?’ in his catalogue essay accompanying Kathy Temin’s capacious three-part installation at ACCA in 1995 urged us to remember. Now, nineteen years later, I vividly recollect the way Kathy adeptly sculpted the domestic interior of ACCA, then situated in the Domain Gardens in South Yarra, with felt, fur and padding. Soft/hard, sturdy/pliable, memory/forgetting, loss/longing unfolded in her un-monumental installation. The Yiddish word haimish or homely comes to mind: a configuration of memorial objects compelling us to remember personal and collective histories. Kathy was part of a cohort of artists exhibiting at the artist-run space Store 5 who manipulated domestic materials, refashioning and softening the hallmarks of high modernist abstraction.