Chartwell Notes

Even for your greatest distraction I would never leave you (House), with its sewing machine pedal, model house, and exposed mechanics, belongs to a broader series of absurdist kinetic sculptures produced by Simon Cavanough in the early 2000s. Another example appeared in the 2001 group exhibition that was now, this is then at Gitte Weise Gallery, Sydney. It featured an elaborate contraption painstakingly engineered to inflate a small balloon.

Drawing on the forms and aspirations of industrial engineering, these works gently parody humanity’s persistent desire to overcome earthly limits. Their fascination with flight, invention, and improbable machinery feels newly resonant in an era marked by renewed ambitions for lunar and deep-space exploration.

Today, Cavanough works as a prop and furniture maker and fabrication specialist for theatre, cultural institutions, and screen productions through his Sydney-based workshop, Macgyver Models. Appropriately, this early work bears all the hallmarks of a technically minded tinkerer: ingenious, eccentric, and meticulously crafted. It is the kind of object one might imagine whirring away with some obscure purpose in a Wallace and Gromit animation.