But that’s exactly where you’ll find them during the six weeks of the Biennale of Australian Art while the kitchen-inspired sculptures of Brisbane artist Donna Marcus are on display in the George Farmer Building.

Ms Marcus has made a name for herself across the globe for her use of aluminium kitchenware in eye-catching artforms.

Her BOAA exhibition is a combination of previous works and a series of three pieces called Eureka that she created specifically for the Ballarat audience.

Ms Marcus has been sculpting using aluminium kitchenware for more than two decades. Aluminium is her favoured material because of its history – both as a raw material and in its industrial form.

“The three large pieces in the Eureka series use the really old aluminium beakers that people used to have in their car glove box,” she said.

They are set in to large bowls in a series of three sculptures hanging on the wall using rose gold, white gold and yellow gold cups as the centrepiece of each bowl in a nod to Ballarat’s gold-rush past.

Unlike many artists who find their supplies in art stores, Ms Marcus haunts op shops to find her materials.

“I have been interested in aluminium for a long time. Aluminium has had an interesting life. It’s changed in value and in the 19^th century was once as valuable as gold when it was being developed. It’s a truly modern material as you could not have aluminium without a mass of electricity,” she said.

“It’s a material that has made a huge change to the world. It has always interested me that it’s the same humble material that is used to make aeroplanes, and jelly moulds. It’s a material of modernism … that has gone from being very valuable to a throw-away aluminium can.”

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The cups, bowls and other utensils that Ms Marcus works with have also had their own lives, with the dents and scratches of their previous life contributing to the artwork of their new life.

Unlike many of the artists exhibiting in the George Farmer building who installed their own displays, Ms Marcus has not yet seen her exhibition but will travel to Ballarat in the coming weeks to see her works and the hundreds of other artworks created for BOAA.

She’ll also visit local op shops to pick up more aluminium kitchenware and plans to drive slowly back to her Brisbane home visiting as many op shops as she can.

“You can’t find it as much as you once could. It was a rich theme to mine,” she said.

BOAA runs at various locations across Ballarat until November 6. 

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