The park. The kitchen. The backyard. How can we better care for spaces we inhabit? Carolyn Corletto and Fran Callen archive collections gathered from observing and learning about their immediate surroundings, domestic and natural. Carolyn in assemblages of found and discarded objects into which she breathes new life, and Fran in drawing-based palimpsests created over her kitchen table – a process borne of motherhood necessity. Carolyn Corletto works tenderly. Collects obsessively. She creates curious installations; intimate collections of tiny discarded domestic and natural ‘specimens’ discovered and accumulated from home and on walks in local parks. Objects are organised, prepared, and some finely adorned with delicate drawing in thread, pencil or painted. Each is held lovingly in one-inch handthrown ceramic vessels created on a miniature potters’ wheel or displayed as dearly held elements in larger collections, assembled to suggest narratives. Carolyn describes her art practice as an investigation of ‘the materiality of discarded domestic and ephemeral natural objects as repositories of identity and memory. Each work offers an acutely focussed encounter with an environment balanced between vulnerability and resilience.’ She is interested in unusual combinations of materials, experimenting with fragility and strength. Connections are made between found objects and material processes as they assert their status as saved, rehabilitated or collected. During Covid restrictions when obsession with making was able to take hold undistracted, Carolyn recognised the sense of control these occupations afford in times of uncertainty. She invites us to look more closely, to keep our eyes open to the urgency of fragility. In Fran’s collection of ‘Tabletop Drawings’, created between 2016 and the present, domestic routines and an intergenerational flow of knowledge mark evolving palimpsests across unstretched canvas ‘tablecloths’. Family moments leave suggested narratives in the tracing of objects passed over the kitchen table, in snippets of time motherhood allows. Her children participate, scrawls and spills changing as they grow. Materials found in the kitchen and backyard become mark-making mediums. Daily routines become drawing processes. In recent iterations, negative-space jig-saws into three-dimensions, becoming plaster-cast interiors of the objects that left their trace. Fran invites viewers to gather round the table, to pick up and rearrange the objects. To discover what lies beneath. Fran’s home sits amongst endangered Grey Box Grassy Woodland, on Kaurna land. Some ‘tablecloths’ are layered over more public table tops with collaborations by passers-by. Others are influenced by formal elements of early botanical illustration, used to guide the gathering of family chaos into order. The drawings become a form of education as with her children, they learn about the space they live in, fostering an interest in local native plants, and the natural world. Kaurna words for local plants are pencilled onto the canvas, with advice and permission from Kaurna Warra Karrpanthi.