The boundaries between Art, Craft and Design are power relationships between interested parties; depending on your territory certain assumptions are held to be true. One of the problems being faced by Donald in this exhibition is how to position himself within a milieu which is no longer clearly defined. His work begins negotiating around some of the assumptions of craft practice, without setting them aside. The object's commodity status - its ability to be used as furniture, to be desired and ultimately possessed - is rendered problematic along with notions of expertise, the significance of the maker's hand, and the nobility of labour. As part of a Master's program at the University of Wollongong. Donald found himself recalling memories of the childhood we shared in Wollongong's northern suburbs. He sought to approach this wet combination of longing and revulsion in his work, while continuing to refine the drier problems of formalism within furniture design. So the work embodies divergent applications of the imagination, each one supported and in the same moment undercut by the other. This is the dynamic which motivates the work on all levels, and which is the source of its failure. The failure, I would argue, which is the measure of its success. The work is very difficult to consume satisfactorily because it doesn't fit into clear categories. It's not so much that the work crosses boundaries, rather that astute viewers are made aware of their own boundary positions in coming to terms with the work. Fetishisation of the surface is a phenomenon of much wood design, and surface is one of a number of metaphors being deployed here. Crossing, Buoy, Bask, and Aground are all titles which describe happenings on or above the surface of water. Since consideration of the surface inevitably evokes the depths, in some way these titles record a discomfort with depth, an avoidance of risk, of fear associated with being in over your head. Such an avoidance can present its own dangers, attested to by the title Aground. The work seems to embody dreams of water, which relate in an unfathomable way to memories that Donald reactivated on the south coast. But these works are not representations of dreams. The relationship between the object, the maker and the reader is more complex than that. Meaning exists somewhere in the currents flowing between those positions rather than prior to the reading: it's an effect rather than a cause. The pieces open onto a number of psycho-sexual readings about power and families which may or may not have anything to do with autobiography. Central to the arrangement at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, is the piece called Crossing. It's a table by the looks of it, or perhaps a bridge, supported at each end by piles of treated sand, which are remarkably like termite mounds. This establishes an unsettling contradiction for a piece of fine wooden furniture; the supporting mechanism for the piece is the agent of its collapse. Further to this, the mounds prevent the head and the foot of the table, traditionally positions of power, from being occupied, changing them into sources of decay and transformation. Bask consists of two silver lycra covered zeppelin things, human scale, lying side by side to the left as one enters the gallery. These are light emitting objects, except only one is connected to the power supply and glowing from within. The second is disconnected, its plug and lead neatly coiled up; passively reflecting light from the other. It's impossible for me not to understand them as male and female because of this gesture with the mains outlet, and simply because a dialogue about power is set up. Active and passive, productive and receptive, radiating and reflecting like the sun and the moon. But because this is not a representation, it's not as simple as one being male and the other female. Maternal and paternal signifiers constantly keep shifting in and out of one another as I consider it. The terms of the dichotomy trade places so that no one is ever on top. Then there is the piece called Buoy (yes, the pun is obvious) - five identical anthropomorphic lamps each the height of its maker. At the artist's talk he nonchalantly placed his hat on one of them. Here the metaphorical play is around security, light and darkness again. The buoy indicating a passage through difficult water, the lamp signifying the inside; warmth and comfort with the dark unknown outside. In three out of five of the pieces elements penetrate one another, to such a degree in Assay that the element forming the base appears to be the cause of a tightly controlled split in the element forming the top. This is akin to Crossing; the base is both structurally supporting and semantically destabilising. In those pieces, which could loosely be described as table pieces, the surfaces are unsettling - full of holes and gaps. For me these readings are made possible through calling in to question but not abandoning the usefulness of the objects. The extent to which the work fails to live up to what a market might determine for it is a measure of its ability to articulate other concerns. The uneasy status of the pieces, coupled with their domesticity, catapults them off the bridge and into the murky depths, into dreams that have you grinding your teeth. This is the dynamic. It's the part of Donald that doesn't know and can't control those termites of his, which makes his work turn around and around on itself, rendering traditional categories ambiguous. And it's the part of him that doesn't want to get his feet wet, which resists this and is attracted to manifestations of control. Though this arrangement of things is more than just display, the sense of necessity which exists in some of the individual pieces is missing from the group as a whole. Is Buoy five discrete elements, part of a 'bread and butter' series, or not? How much could be left out? What is the logic or aesthetic at work in the orientation of the pieces? Closer consideration of installation strategies could increase the potential for such an event to generate meaning. But perhaps it comes down to territory after all; to deciding who it is that one needs to address. I keep returning to a memory from the south coast; my father swimming out into a stormy winter sea one day to salvage some flotsam he'd seen from the house through binoculars. It seemed like a risky business to me. When he eventually made it back to shore he was dragging a piece of broken hatch cover, so large and heavily waterlogged he could hardly carry it on dry land. This timber slab formed the working surface of the bench he built for his home carpentry the following summer.