Drawing on the luxury and/or personalised car as a symbol of material identity in the domestic suburban landscape, Packed Lunch offers up questions surrounding self-concept and the self-attribution phenomenon. The work presented probes how material possessions—cars, homes, perfect lawns—shape identity and symbolise economic status. These domestic luxuries, once symbols of aspiration, increasingly highlight social and economic disparities, anchoring self-perception to societal hierarchies.
Promoting both suburbanisation and individualisation, there is a sense that these domestic luxuries contribute to the loneliness epidemic, where physical proximity in car-dependent suburbs masks emotional isolation. The quick uptake of Tesla owners applying stickers to their cars that read “I bought this before Elon went crazy” captures an identity crisis, where material choices clash with shifting moral perceptions.
Despite their promise of self-representation, these objects fail to resolve the essential unknowability of others. Acknowledging the processes of material embodiment, their mechanized interfaces merge human and machine identities, distilling multiple selves into generic, alienating voices through features such as navigation.
The car and the domestic built form act as social signifiers, constructing and constraining self-concept, revealing the fragility of identity when tied to the material. They are an outward representation of the attribution of one’s successes to one’s inherent characteristics – that you too can have these things if you just look within and that these external elements of your life are self-defining.
Image credit: Adina West, Dirt roads in residential zones (detail), 2025, oil, acrylic, toilet paper and sawdust on MDF, 180 x 60 x 7cm
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