Annabelle Collett Party Girl Necklace, 2006, assorted plastics, wool, 550 x 250mm; photo: courtesy of the artist

Annabelle Collett is the second artist to exhibit in the 2006 season of Inside SAM's Place . This collaboration between Craftsouth and the South Australian Museum continues to yield intriguing junctions of visual art/craft and the various sciences and disciplines that reside within the museum. Inside SAM's Place is based on a model of research and response. Participating artists identify aspects of the museum's collection, or of museological practice itself, and are granted access to it for research purposes, which in turn provides a starting point for the creation of new works.

In the case of Artifiction , Annabelle Collett responds to the museum's much-loved Pacific Cultures Gallery, in the process tying in a number of social, ecological and artistic concerns. The Pacific Cultures Gallery boasts over 4,000 shields, weapons, utensils, masks, ornaments and ritual objects from almost all the Pacific nations. With her focus largely on objects of ornament, Collett replies to this collection with a range of adornments crafted from gaudy plastic waste products. The exhibition is ambitious in its scope, though perhaps not always successful.

Previous exhibitions in the Inside SAM's Place program have been knowingly placed within the display or collection that inspired them. Unfortunately, with the Pacific Cultures Gallery undergoing a significant overhaul, Collett's work is relegated to the museum's foyer and arguably suffers as a result. With Collett's responses distanced from the source material that prompted them, much of the work's richness and complexity is sadly diffused. These circumstances throw into sharp focus the enormous weight of meaning that the museum setting brings to this project.

While Artifiction still communicates direct and unambiguous commentary on throw-away consumerism and its inevitable environmental impact, there are other, more subtle layers of meaning that seem dependent on viewing the work in context. The accompanying catalogue essay by Kathie Muir usefully serves to highlight some of the complex issues that Collett attempts to engage. These include such loaded and fraught subjects as the political, cultural and ethical implications of collecting and anthropology. While such concerns are undeniably present in the work, they are perhaps less evident without the much needed context of the Pacific Cultures collection itself.

Similarly, one can't help but feel that the work's formal and material aspects would have been further enriched by appropriate context. The sculptural intelligence Collett has brought to her materials and processes is obvious, but perhaps the full extent of it isn't clear. Without the reference point of the collection, viewers are not privy to the rigorous transcriptions the artist has made from the original artefacts. Through a shared vocabulary of craft processes - weaving, plaiting, beading and so forth - Collett makes wonderfully fluid translations from natural materials to the plastic detritus of 21 st century life. Being able to see these correspondences in the flesh would, I imagine, have been a richly rewarding experience.

Annabelle Collett Big Red Neckpiece, 2006, assorted plastics, thread, 700 x 350mm; photo: courtesy of the artist

While Collett's work may be denied the chance to converse with its source of inspiration, it unexpectedly speaks to another collection of quite a different kind. In a gallery adjacent to the museum's foyer is a display of washing tools (scrubbing brushes, scourers and the like) from the collection of Steve Keirl. Keirl began collecting cleaning implements to demonstrate design principles to his students; his collection has now grown to over 600 and taken on a life of its own. Serendipitously, the display seems to act as an adjunct to Artifiction , with both exhibitions offering sympathetic propositions on how we might give meaning and value to that which is ostensibly 'throw-away'.

To be fair, however, the recurring issue of context is not necessarily always to the detriment of the work. One could regard the relatively blank, neutral context of the museum foyer as potentially very liberating, allowing for broader scope in interpretation. Without obvious cues and prompts provided by its setting, we have to look harder at the work to determine where it might fit in the world.

The photographs that accompany the exhibition - in which the various necklaces, bracelets and garments are sported by models - might assist in our reading of the work. These photographs serve to liberate the works from the notional confines of the exhibition space and assert them as plausible, wearable items. The images also seemed to highlight Artifiction 's aesthetic of industrial tribalism. For me, this in turn evokes near-future fantasies of the Mad Max variety and their visions of worlds rendered near-uninhabitable by human folly and unsustainable living practices. Whether deliberate or not, this allusion elegantly loops back on the artist's ecological concerns. While Collett's work has about it a cautionary tone, it has none of the bleakness of those post-apocalyptic tales. Rather, a sense of fun pervades the work. Consider the humorously ironic links to the natural world that the show offers; scanning the display, the viewer's eye catches on a soy sauce dispenser in the shape of a fish or a gaudy plastic animal from a Christmas cracker. At the exhibition's core is an essential act of imbuing waste or detritus with renewed worth and purpose. It is an act that is potent and life-affirming. Despite Artifiction 's serious underlying concerns, each artefact in the exhibition embodies a genuine sense of joy as well as being a timely critique of our culture of consumption.