Made to be Lived With

A fair is unique in that is a form of gathering that knows it is temporary. Each year, for four days at Carriageworks temporary walls go up, work arrives from a hundred directions, and something like a city assembles beneath the sawtooth roof, then, just as quickly, disperses. This was a steadier edition than some of previous years, an even-keeled current underwrote the atmosphere in which confidence was distributed rather than concentrated, rewarding the patient looker. Arguably, the question a fair poses is rarely the one the market asks. It is not what sells, but what you would keep: which of the thousands of works you could imagine drawing out of the halo of habit each morning, and living beside.

This year the floor answered in the language of the made. Glass and ceramics, so long filed under craft, now sit comfortably in the blue-chip conversation. Sabbia Gallery's ceramics by Alfred Lowe reportedly sold out within the hour, and the appetite for the handmade felt like more than fashion. In a moment when so much of the week's talk turned on what machines and AI can now conjure, there was something clarifying about the object you have to be in a room with: the slow, the singular, the thing your senses believe. Across its breadth, the fair upheld works made to be handled and kept. Noel McKenna's small, artfully simple domestic scenes ask only for a quiet wall and reward it daily; the ceramics realm supplied its usual monsters and quirk, objects that earn their keep through the imagination’s love of fables and folklore. A good vessel asks for nothing more than a shelf and a lifetime.

Sydney Contemporary’s deepest current this year, though, was memory. Monica Rani Rudhar's Peacock earrings that my mother kept safe rendered an heirloom in a form that carries a whole reservoir of family with it; Sid Pattni set his masked sovereigns adrift in star-strewn skies; Abdul Abdullah beautiful, paired images at Ames Yavuz’s that examine the complicated relationships between ownership, custodianship and cultural inheritance. A short walk away, at Artbank, the inaugural prize went to Afghan-born, Melbourne-based Elyas Alavi for a painting drawn from memory, now entering the national collection. First Nations practice ran through the fair's most ambitious commissions, Vincent Namatjira's wry sovereigns, Ken Thaiday Snr's suspended Dhari, Reko Rennie down at the Fish Market. These are not works you merely display. They steward stories conceived to be carried rather than known, and they change the weather of a room by bringing its remnants of the past into the present.

Fittingly, the fair's most literal argument for living with art happened away from the aisles, in hotel rooms. At The EVE, six designers each took a guest room and spun a whole new world tethered to themes of play, botanical, edible, collectible, interior and light, reconciled under the banner of The Object Show. In a Surry Hills apartment, Emma Elizabeth and Cassandra Bird staged Hōlus-Bōlus, an exhibition built on the collision, the bringing together all at once of contemporary art, collectible design and domestic life. Both understood what a booth can only gesture at: that a work truly begins only once it is placed, lived beside, folded into the unbroken line of one's days.

That is the pleasure that can sometimes be forgotten in the sensorial overload of a fair, and central to the premise of this journal: that to hang a work is the last and most personal act of making a home, the point at which connoisseurship becomes cohabitation. It is a threshold Melbourne's galleries are increasingly happy to cross. Neon Parc, fresh from a strong booth, is about to dress the penthouse at 49 Walsh Street, the MORQ -designed Neometro building in South Yarra, a small sign of how naturally the fair floor now flows towardand through the front door.

That, in the end, is the truest test a fair offers, beneath the commerce and the crowds: not what impresses you in the aisle, but what you could imagine living alongside. The work that follows you home, that you would set across a room and never tire of. That is the work that was, all along, made to be lived with.

You can find out more about Sydney Contemporary on their website. Photography by Wes Nel. Words by Tiffany Jade.