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Since the early 1990s, Melbourne-based artist Kathy Temin has populated the gallery space with wonky, hand-made creatures and objects; irreverent and anti-authoritarian sculptural works that explore connections between the art historical investigations of movements such as minimalism and arte povera and the more intimate concerns of domesticity and craft. Temin's signature use of fake fur playfully combines associations of childhood and toys, safety and comfort, with the overt materiality of post-1960s art; firmly placing the emotional and the personal within the hallowed halls of art. The artist's ongoing interest in suburbia and pop culture icons similarly explores the intersection and competition between high and low culture, good and bad taste, resulting in works that relish their deliberately uncomfortable roles. Unlike the process-driven, problem-solving concerns of the modernist artists whose work she riffs off, Temin's practice works against a Gestalt experience of the sculptural object and instead demands an acceptance of open-endedness and joyful embrace of the enigmatic.

On the eve of a major survey exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art and the launch of a new project at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, Temin discusses the relationship of her work to modernism and her particular marking of memory.

Kelly Gellatly: Many of the titles of your sculptures from the early to mid-1990s declare the works as 'problems' (Duck-rabbit problem, 1991, for instance), defiantly living up to this claim through their ability to complicate and confound issues surrounding perception, cognition and seeing. Fluffy and deflated, they occupy an uncomfortable, indeterminate space; posing questions to which there are seemingly no answers.

Kathy Temin: The problems are some of the earliest works in the Heide exhibition and they were a result of asking questions about the resolution of making art - modernist ideas about picture making and abstract sculpture from the 1960s and 1970s. I was trying to leave the work in an unresolved state and referred to this through the titles. When I see them today they look finished, but I was referencing industrial fabrication and perfect lines. They were soft, sewn and stuffed and also formally fell between being paintings and sculptures. The in-betweenness was a place I wanted to explore, as was making work from craft materials and craft-related activities ...

KG: Can you explain the relationship to modernism in your work? Does it remain a source of inspiration and/or contention?

KT: It is partly the transformation of what happens when you engage with another artwork and rework that into another material, scale and context. I have chosen to do this for particular reasons. With Frank Stella's painting Arbeit macht frei, 1958, it was about wanting to understand the gaps between the title and the abstract line image of the painting and the disconnection between the two. This disconnection is something I did not understand in 1995 and I felt that the painting and the title held something significant for me, so I made the work to explore it. It wasn't just a formal translation from painting to sculpture ...

As an artist I have consistently engaged with private and collective memory through popular culture, suburbia, fan cultures and art history. In the 1995 exhibition 'Three Indoor Monuments' at the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, Melbourne, the focus was where art history, Jewish history and my own personal identity coincided. It was in this context that the reworking of Stella's Arbeit macht frei was made. The title of Stella's painting is the text that is embedded into iron gates above many concentration camps, which translates as 'work sets you free'.

During my recent visit to three of the concentration camps in Europe, I felt physically very small and saw that these vast spaces were surrounded by beautiful tree-lined countryside. For 'Optimism', I wanted to create a space that translated the feeling of smallness, without being empty and vast, with the comfort and protection of the softness. In the work the trees are anthropomorphic, as is the physicality of making and moving them. I have recently been to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park where there is a similar feeling when walking between two long walls of enormous stylised green trees.

I am working with landscape as an immersive experience that engages with private and collective memory (and associations of grief and loss), but one that is combined with hope and faith, like memorial gardens; hence the optimism of the Wedgwood-blue sky background. I was thinking about the work as a contemplative space where the presence of absence was evoked. The scale is monumental. I can't determine what audiences will do when they are within these works, but I can generate a path. If people want to stand, sit, hug trees, get out of it quickly, or not enter at all, these are all interesting responses ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Spring 2009 issue.