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Her plants, her books - of which she had been a collector from the first hour of her commanding a shilling - her writing-desk, and her works of charity and ingenuity, were all within her reach; or if indisposed for employment, if nothing but musing would do, she could scarcely see an object in that room which had not an interesting remembrance connected with it.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)

The numerous and non-hierarchical collections of Peter Atkins and Dana Harris - antique textiles, tribal art, sculpture, painting, furniture, jewellery, vintage china, carnival glass, 'nanna' bags, empty jewellery boxes, 1940s dress buckles and so on - have been assembled over a period of time with limited resources. Atkins describes their Melbourne home - a light-filled former warehouse on three levels - as 'a machine for collecting, with spaces for collation, storage and display'.

While still a student at the National Art School, Sydney, Atkins's passion for collecting was galvanised. He began to attend monthly auctions and to acquire, on a strict student's budget, (mostly Melanesian) tribal art. But it was some time later in Lima, Peru, in October 1992 - during a period of intensive travel that provided the material for his gold medal award-winning 'World Journal' series of forty panels, exhibited at the 1994 VIII Triennale in New Delhi, India - that Atkins realised he had truly become a collector. Ever mindful of his first dealer (and collecting mentor) Garry Anderson's advice to buy one exceptional work, rather than several inferior pieces, he handed over $250 for an intact pre-Columbian Chancay tunic discovered amongst an array of 900-1300 AD textile fragments (which had survived buried in clay pots along the central coast of Peru). The purchase left him almost penniless. But as he explains:
These kinds of opportunities present themselves rarely ... I was determined to acquire the tunic even if it meant a period of hardship. The tunic is a museum piece and part of the role of being a collector is that you become a custodian of objects. I imagine that at some stage the tunic will end up in a public collection in Australia.

For many years, the more (ostensibly) prosaic collections - such as used condom wrappers, lint gathered from the family clothes dryer, bread bag tags, shoelaces, a discarded Mills & Boon library etc. - have enriched Atkins's ongoing series of journals or visual diaries. In a logical development, Atkins latest dynamic paintings - reduced in scale, starker, less painterly - are for the first time painted on plywood (a material he has used from the outset as a backing for the journals). As the gap between the journals and paintings continues to narrow, 'there is', says Atkins, 'a clearer reference to the source material'. 
 
A compelling aspect of Atkins's solo exhibitions has frequently been the display of these curiosities - a foam toe separator, a Russel Wright glass and so on - and they have now been impeccably assembled on shelves in a cabinet in Atkins's studio. Immediately recognisable is the grouping of five 1960s Susie Cooper cups and saucers (designed following the merger of her company with that of Josiah Wedgwood), which were the reference point for five large paintings in 1995 - most notably Harlequinade and Diablo. 
Two episodes illustrate the broader, infinitely more complex nature of these collections and their importance within the art practices of both Atkins and Harris. Over a period of three months in 2005, Atkins could be observed at four o'clock every Friday morning, following a self-prescribed route through the streets of Brunswick, in order to rummage through his neighbours' recycling bins for coloured plastic bottle tops. Expressing a narrative of twelve weeks duration and revealing a surprisingly extensive tonal range, these discarded bottle tops ultimately formed the series titled 'Special Project #1 - Community Polychromes'. They represent the first in a new series of works that explore local narratives and have since paved the way for the exquisite 'Special Project #2 - Remnant Threads', 2006, which was the outcome of a residency at the Victorian Tapestry Workshop in Melbourne.
 
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Complementing the mid-twentieth century thrust of these collections is the (mostly sculptural) work of a number of contemporary Australian artists including Tim Silver, Patricia Piccinini, Michelle Nikou, Ben Quilty, Scott Redford and Koji Ryui. In its awareness of the transformative possibilities of the mundane or discarded object, Ryui's series of seven candy-coloured sculptures - fashioned from flexible drinking straws - is conceptually attuned to the work of both Harris and Atkins. Also represented are Sidney Nolan - whose (spray enamel) painting Crocodile attack, 1988, is the focal point of the upstairs living space - Tony Tuckson, Michael Johnson and Leonard Brown, as well as Indigenous women artists Wintjiya Napaltjarri, Katarra Butler Napaltjarri, Eubena Nampitjin and Makinti Napanangka. A pair of wall-mounted Gray's Pottery, Staffordshire plates designed by Susie Cooper in the 1920s, wittily recall with their hand-painted concentric bands of bright colour, the target paintings of Jasper Johns - an impression subtly reinforced by their placement beneath a 2003 Rose Nolan pennant flag (although Atkins says this allusion is not at all intentional).

On an adjacent wall, Harris's suspended shadowform sculpture indicates a recurring feature of her practice - a preoccupation with thread. In 2003 eighteen of these yarn-bound steel works were commissioned for the Promenade Hotel in Melbourne. Neatly buttoned, variously-patterned collars, which have been removed from a variety of boys' blue shirts, make up her wall installation blue collar works, 2006, and in the upstairs living area, two of her house plan samples, 2006, - knitted interpretations of the plans of houses she has lived in - form a spidery backdrop to the Meadmore chairs.
Textiles comprised an integral part of Harris's childhood, since her father was an importer of fabric, who several times a year travelled to China, Japan and India (the traditional silk routes), bringing home suitcases full of swatches. 'I have memories,' says Harris, 'of seeing small coloured silk squares, arranged from pale cream to deep purple, layered in folders'. Also apparent in her elegantly resolved sculptural work is the influence of the years that she lived in Japan (1992 to 1994), where she attended classes at the renowned Sogetsu School of Ikebana in Tokyo (in a building designed by Kenzo Tange with a garden by Isamu Noguchi). There she learnt to 'use all types of materials, not just plants, and place them in relationship to one another. It's a sensibility, a type of awareness to materials in space that I am fascinated by. I still have times when I realise I am making ikebana in my studio more than ten years later.'
Harris spent her first night in Tokyo in a small ryokan, sleeping on a futon in a six-tatami room.

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If for Harris it is form that is all-important, Atkins is also ineluctably drawn to narrative and the (often imperfect) signs of human industry. Frequently witty, at times poignant, the multi-layered collections of Atkins and Harris, in which buttons sewn onto a card or a 1920s hand-painted ceramic plate are accorded the same consideration as a painting or sculpture, have involved passion, personal sacrifice, travel, a modicum of luck and dogged perseverance. Above all they offer, through a particularly engaging form of alchemy, an alternative view of the world. 'We have fallen more in love with art as we get older', says Atkins. 'The infatuation becomes deeper and doesn't fade.'
 
This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the article in full in the March 2007 issue of Art & Australia.