A kitchen stove is the ostensible subject of Abstract – the kitchen stove, but Eric Wilson applied this theme for its potential to explore purely abstract concerns. He reduced the various elements to a flat pattern and reassembled them in a manner akin to musical composition, repeating, varying and balancing motifs and devising rhythms.

Close inspection reveals fragments of printed and embossed wallpaper collage. These enhance appreciation of texture and depth but also convey the idea of the stove and its kitchen surroundings, rather than simply providing a visual replication of it. Wilson was a follower of cubism, which put a new emphasis on such an approach. He was influenced by the example of Georges Braque and Juan Gris, introducing collage elements to prompt a reconstruction of the subject through imaginary connections to the ‘real’ world.

Colin Lanceley’s triptych displays an extraordinary array of urban detritus, both domestic and industrial in origin. The impetus for this work came from his fascination in the histories that cling to such battered objects and their power to evoke memories and associations. He was strongly influenced by modernist poet TS Eliot’s collagist approach of juxtaposing disparate ideas to convey contemporary life.

The title of this work derived from the third of Eliot’s Four quartets, published in 1941. In this poem, Eliot’s imagery of river and sea evoked the passage of time and human culture through the flotsam and jetsam of the past. It was revelatory for Lanceley, showing how he might similarly recover some essential poetic essence from the chaos and waste of contemporary life in his work.

Robert Klippel’s use of collage enabled him to create the large-scale work Philadelphia with relative ease. He commissioned photographer Robert Walker to make the photographic enlargements that it comprises from a 19th-century book of machinery illustrations. Klippel arranged and modified the cut-out photographs so skilfully that the whole appears seamlessly ordered, giving the deceptive impression of mechanically functional and logically composed entities.

Philadelphia reflects Klippel’s interest in exploring the relationship between mechanical and organic forms. A surreal metropolis whose cluster of mechanical ‘spires’ rise from a complex subterranean ‘engine room’, it creates an industrial parallel to the natural forces that generate mountains or trees out of the landscape. Klippel’s conception of this fantastical image and his reliance on chance in its selection, scaling and juxtaposition was influenced and guided by both surrealism and his concern for formal structure.

Robert Klippel created this assemblage from wooden pattern-parts for machinery, collected during the early 1960s from a disused shipbuilding foundry in Balmain. The forms bear the trace of their former life as functional industrial objects, in surface gashes, colouring, numbers and letters.

Klippel was chiefly interested in their shapes. He saw these ready-made objects as a rich source of raw material akin to the ‘shape alphabet’ that he had developed decades earlier as a young artist, sourced from nature, machinery, the works of other artists and cultures, and under the microscope. Despite their mechanical origins, the carved wooden forms evoke a natural quality which inspired Klippel to create his ideal synthesis of organic and geometric form.

Tony Albert contrasts the strength and dignity implied by the word ‘hunter’ with a debased view of Aboriginal people and culture as represented by the kitsch tourist souvenir-ware featuring ‘portrait’ heads.

Albert collected similar material as a boy and uses its familiarity to many Australians as a means of engaging serious thinking on racist discrimination against Aboriginal people. In this context, the word ‘hunter’ implies the Aboriginal hunter of pre-settlement Australia, the white colonial hunter of ‘Aborigines’ on the frontier and the artist himself as a collector of these wares. The white plastic ‘alien’ head on the letter ‘H’ is Tony Albert’s signature reference – intended as a symbol of cultural alienation and displacement by Aboriginal people within Australian society.

Made from the painted pages of paperback books, Katherine Hattam’s collage presents a studio/kitchen table to which she has added charcoal drawings of familiar things from her domestic and artistic worlds.

On the surface, this work appears as a still-life image of domestic objects, but closer inspection reveals a work of richly allusive complexity and emotive power. Selecting aspects of the past that were important to her identity, Hattam collaged title spines and pages from key texts of second-wave feminism, psychology, education and fiction into the work. They reveal her interests during the 1970s – a formative period of her life when women were actively consciousness-raising to overcome sexist oppression and gain equal rights.

Mike Brown’s dense collage of nude women in sexually suggestive poses was sourced from magazines, comics, newspapers and other media of the day and reflects prevailing attitudes to women in Australian culture of the late 1960s.

Brown wanted his art to be made from everyday life and its materials . His choice of images for this collage acknowledged the existence of private sexual fantasy, the porn industry and sexually exploitative advertising. It also reflected his antagonism towards the elitism and conventions of ‘high’ art. Today it is more difficult to appreciate the relative shock value of this work at the time it was made, when the broader Australian society was deeply conservative. For those who welcomed the socially progressive 1960s, however, it represented a liberating celebration of sexual freedom coupled (from today's perspective) with a blindness to its sexism.