WORN - Wearable and Unwearable Objects

Constructed from fragments of vintage treasure, the works hover between jewellery and artefact, suggesting wearability while resisting it through scale, weight, and imbalance. Drawing on traditions of ritual, status, and identity, the exhibition shifts adornment from the body to the wall, inviting viewers to reconsider the objects we wear, keep, and remember.

About the Artist
Kitty Calvert is a Melbourne-based collaborative art practice between Julia Brampton and Phill Calvert, working from a studio within the Gasworks Creative Precinct. Their assemblage sculptures emerge from a process they describe as both treasure hunt and treasure build, collecting, reimagining, and transforming discarded objects into singular works rich with memory and character.

Driven by a love of vintage materials, the practice centres on the belief that objects carry histories. Each fragment, marked by patina, wear, dents, and time, is treated as a vessel of lived experience. Rather than restoring or disguising these traces, the artists preserve them, allowing past and present to coexist within new sculptural forms. The result is work that evokes nostalgia while playfully reconfiguring the familiar into something unexpected.

Beyond assemblage, Kitty Calvert’s practice extends into spatial installation and large-scale sculpture. They have designed and constructed immersive exhibition environments and recently created Contemplation Spot , a large outdoor steel sculpture resembling a stack of vintage books, installed on a hill in Gasworks Arts Park.

Across all scales, their work explores how objects communicate, how they connect and generate meaning through proximity. It reflects on cycles of consumption and obsolescence, while offering an alternative: that what is discarded can be revived, revalued, and reimagined.

Balancing humour with sentiment, the work sits between sculpture and installation, inviting viewers into a world where materials are transformed and memory is given new form.