A multi-format project with an Arte Povera attitude, MAKING DO RHYMES WITH POO was an installation with a set constructed from recycled materials, performances and an exhibition. Justene performed a working week over seven days, completing menial tasks with her body that transformed the gallery.

Through her work, Justene Williams deals with conscious and unconscious forms of labour undertaken by the body. The title, MAKING DO RHYMES WITH POO reads as both a way of ‘making do’ with what’s at one’s disposal (a nod to the artist’s working-class upbringing and time spent with her father in his wrecking yard) as well as to describe the automatic labour of ‘making’ with the body, such as defecation or growing hair or nails. The title also points to the history of performance art and artists who have used their bodies and excrement to test limits and possibilities.

The gallery is the studio and the stage, a space where action, energy, ideas and sounds are produced, made and unmade across the week. Labour is presented as pleasure, play and pain.

Over the course of the exhibition, Justene produced ‘goods’ that were incorporated into the installation and used within her performances. The space partly resembled a pond, the night sky, a factory, a shrine, a shop, a dump, or a workshop. There was a polyphony of materials including radios, foil, cardboard, water, timber, foam, industrial bags, video projections, screens, costumes, mirrors and pulped paper lovingly shaped into poo-shaped sculptures of varying lengths. Materials with a previous life that still hold energy and have the capacity to be cannibalised, revived and made into something new.

RADIOS have appeared in my work since my earliest performances for camera. The sounds and conversations that come from the box are messages to me, and I use them to create a stream of consciousness script, receiving messages from people who have passed over to the other side. People have been trying to communicate with the dead since the beginning of human history.

Using costumes, Justene was transformed — THE ROOSTER is the big cock, the boss chicken. When inhabiting this persona, I think about eggs, reproduction. Some of us are free range, whilst some of us are battery hens. Some of us are caged animals, and some of us cock-a-doodle dos.

After the working week, the documentation, materials and re-formed objects were reinserted into the gallery to form the exhibition. Justene invited the audience to consider — What is work for an artist within our consumer culture? What is it to make artwork based in time and space with poor materials? What is the difference between work and life, freedom and alienation? How to perform time? How can I bring my job history and life into my art work? That of a cabaret performer, visual merchandiser, dancer, spruiker, salesperson, model, lecturer, mother, partner.

Flagship/ mothership/ ship wreck, the trinity from the hangover of a catholic education. The Flagship Store — repeatedly folding and displaying clothes, items for sale, models, modelling maquettes, and material, maternal, a mothership staying the course in outer space, shipwreck the world, salvaging the cosmos.

MAKING DO RHYMES WITH POO was an iterative work that was first developed for Te Uru Whitakere Contemporary Gallery, Auckland NZ in 2024. It was reimagined in response to the local context, with this iteration developed on-site at CAT.