For Object Magazine, June, 2006, on the permanent design exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum

Like Scorsese's film on Howard Hughes, it offers an alternative universe -- what the twenties and thirties and forties might have been. A red couch in the shape of lips. A brown couch like a baseball mitt. A couch that seems to have been bent out of a bird cage. A park bench that looks like a music stave in Fantasia.

These physical puns on structure show us, like Dali's pun-paintings, how dreams interpenetrate what we see, and how we, through art, might see things ever anew. Tall vases that look like women in crinolines. Blue dresses that flow to the ground like melting toffee. A chair that might be folded copy paper. Vases more red, and roseate, and essence-of-rose, than it seems the spectrum's red could contain. A waltz of whistling kettles. A saraband of saucers. A couch as green and gold as one's childhood idea of money. Palm trees wrought from silver, overshadowing tiny towns. A stained glass window of a brooding, bearded Elizabethan face.

It makes you wonder. Here, to me, is art as great as Raphael's, or Blake's, or Morris's, and greater surely than Whiteley's, whose authors' names like unknown, inert in history. How can we be deluded into forgetting that this achievement is harder by far, by a long, long chalk, than Pollock's or Degas's, or the silly quick -sketch Picasso of his later years?

What love and work went into these wonderful, delicate irreplaceable things. How solid they seem in a world of spin and online and pixillation. How gently does their simple domesticity, their simple utility, move us when such beauty, such needless, engrossing beauty is so arduously and gravely and sweetly added to it.

Above it, angelic Victorian women stare proudly down on a world ill-lost. A world of care and concern and art that mattered, in a semi-religious way, to the artist, an artist anonymous and absorbed. Hail and farewell. How good it is. And how sad it is made no more.