In Kirsten Coelho, the first major publication on a practice spanning thirty years, images of Coelho’s impeccable vessels are interleaved with fragments of poetry and reproductions of paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, Russell Drysdale and Vilhelm Hammershoi. In a series of essays, author Wendy Walker traces the evolution of Coelho’s textured practice, in which an ever-expanding framework of art historical, literary and cinematic references has driven a succession of formal shifts – a shaping of changes. Inherited vocabularies are assimilated in hybridised multiple forms that are without replication. With the adoption of an ensemble mode of presentation, Kirsten Coelho’s small universes of transcultural objects transcend the familiarity of their everyday contexts to enshrine narratives of migration, transition and resettlement.