Omi McCurdie

Don’t sit on the cake table

opening 3-5pm Saturday 4 July

on view in the gallery
4 July – 8 August 2026

“When can we cut the cake? I’m hungry.”
“Omi, get your grubby little fingers out of that cake. Your Nana spent hours making this for you!”
“But Mum…”
“No buts. Put your butt on the floor! I told you the trestle table is wobbly. If you sit on it, it’ll break and you’ll have no cake.”
“Doesn’t matter. Nana already ruined her dress by getting blue icing on it. When I grow up, I’m going to let my daughter have cake whenever she likes.”
“Is that right? Well, one day, when you make your kids their cakes, you can decide. But for now, it’s your father’s house, and we follow the rules. Now go get your father from the TV room—it’s almost the innings break . And for the last time, don’t sit on the cake table.”

There is a particular kind of nostalgia reserved for Australian birthday parties of the ’80s and ’90s. Kids run feral through backyards, tracking pool water through the house while the men gather around the television, the cricket commentary turned up loud enough to drown out the chaos. In the kitchen, women crowd around the table, pouring chips into bowls, topping up plastic wine cups from the goon bag, and pressing the final Smarties and chocolate-coated liquorice onto a birthday cake.
Whether from page 1 or 54 of the Women’s Weekly birthday cake book, the recipes were reliable, affordable, and easy to master. Everyone had the same book, but each finished cake became a quiet measure of care, effort, and expectation. Between jelly-filled swimming pools and lolly-covered rockets, these cakes became strange little performances—bright, playful constructions that also reflected the invisible labour of making a celebration look effortless, and what it meant to be a “good” Australian mother.
Don’t Sit on the Cake Table revisits these iconic birthday cakes as more than nostalgic keepsakes. Through a series of hand-built ceramic sculptures, I recreate their familiar forms with subtle, humorous, and often absurd interventions. They slump, sag, flirt, and misbehave, using visual puns, sexual innuendo, and exaggerated forms to draw viewers in through nostalgia before revealing the labour and expectations embedded in these seemingly innocent celebrations. Borrowing from the bawdy, irreverent humour of Australian culture in the 1980s and 1990s, the works explore how domestic rituals shape memory, family, and ideas of masculinity and femininity across generations.
The exhibition extends beyond ceramic sculpture through sound and installation. A ceramic television plays fragments of the familiar soundtrack of sexist 1990s Australia, while an oversized puppet of a stereotypical Australian man sits drinking longnecks and watching television, detached from the domestic labour unfolding around him. Simultaneously comic and unsettling, the figure embodies a familiar model of masculinity found in many Australian households—the father who rarely spoke to you directly, instead barked instructions through a third party, usually your mother.
By remaking these temporary birthday cakes in clay, I turn fleeting celebrations into permanent objects. Don’t Sit on the Cake Table invites viewers to laugh first, remember second, and then maybe wonder what else was quietly being served alongside the cake.