The four other members of long-running Melbourne art collective DAMP - Deb Kunda, Robert Creedon, Narelle Desmond and Sharon Goodwin - break into something of giggle too. It seems to be their way. "Perhaps we should mention the working title we had for the exhibition?" offers Creedon at one point. "Mockery Crockery." And the laughter continues.

Eventually titled The Harrison Collection after a hypothetical collector who might care to acquire such objects, DAMP members purchased, collected and pilfered ceramics - kitsch, worthless or of considerable monetary or sentimental value - only to shatter them, paint their fragments and stick them back together in a kind of free-form group collage.

"It would become an experiment, like what's the most expensive thing we could afford that we want to break?" says Goodwin. "Do we get something that's priceless and try to use that? Do we use something from our personal lives or from our homes? Or do we use the ugliest things we could find?"

The show crystallises several key themes to have surfaced during DAMP's two-decades, in which the collective has shown in Australia, Japan, Europe and the US and churned through a rolling cast of 74 members, including Geoff Lowe and Jacqueline Riva of renowned collaborative project A Constructed World. The group's performances, installations, videos, painting and sculptural pieces have long worked to erode the delineations between artist, artwork and audience, or as Lynch puts it, "question what constitutes art exchange".

Along the way, they've staged a spaghetti western-style, all-in brawl at an opening at Gertrude Contemporary in 1999, built a giant faux-marble plinth that doubled as a meeting room for Brisbane artist groups for 2009's Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art and chiselled off fragments of a Carrara marble bust to give to gallery visitors. "By breaking up something precious, but then sharing it, the core value of art as a precious object is questioned," Lynch says.

But it's the irreverence with which DAMP manages to skirt such themes that sets their output apart. The objects that populate The Harrison Collection - let alone their titles - resemble an exercise in art history, nudges and winks. There's the Weeping Woman vase, with fragments of DAMP's imitation painting arranged at oblique angles. Then there's a modernist stream, as Kunda points out, with a Di Chirico crockery set, a Guston plate and a Bauhaus vase.

But absurdity and in-jokes lurk too, be they in the form of a reconfigured cream jug dubbed the Cream Master, an angelic statuette titled Victoria's Secret, terrazzo and camouflage vases, the Gen Y Bowl, a Japanese teapot dubbed Sky Handle (which gets a particular rise out of Desmond) and a replica Ming vase comprising patterns from plates each of the artists have in their own homes, plus a series of seemingly random wood grain touches.

"These works are a little different to the Carrara marble," explains Lynch, "in that they've been smashed to smithereens, but then the preciousness is kind of built back into them."

Though the ceramics are commercial art objects in themselves, the group doesn't see The Harrison Collection as a shift in position. As Desmond explains, the show came about when art dealer Geoff Newton happened across the works in DAMP's studio, rather than by any concerted decision to make a commercial show.

"We're still having that same conversation that we've been having for 15 years," she says, going on to reveal that the group keeps a vast, leather-bound scrapbook of "ideas, solutions and spells" dubbed The Book of Shadows (a title they lifted from the early 2000s television series Charmed).

That said, wrangling shattered ceramics does require a new set of working processes. "The key is to not break two things at the same time," says Creedon. "You don't want to get the pieces mixed up."

The Harrison Collection is at Neon Parc until May 3.

neonparc.com.au