Things made to last, and things never meant to. Objects slightly out of time.

Kill or Be Killed is survival mechanics. To make something is to refuse to disappear. A great deal of the work that moves us was made under conditions that should never have existed, and made anyway. That refusal is the spine of the catalogue. Choosing what to keep is the same act, slower.

Almost everything here was made inside a context that has since thinned out or vanished. A tool that knew its job. A pot thrown for a kitchen. A cloth beaten and painted inside a tradition that meant something exact to the people who made it. The practice was the point, and the materials were often sacred before they were anything else. Much of what passes through commercial space was taken without asking, and ends up read as a trophy. It is not a trophy. We hold the lost context as closely as the object, because the object is what is left of it, and because behind glass it stops belonging to anyone.

KOBK presents historical objects, re-presented works, and contemporary practice. Some are kept as found. Others are mounted, stretched, reframed, or given a domestic life they were not made for. Material changes are stated on the product page.

Patina, wear, and prior life are part of the work. We do not restore objects to a state they were never in.

Where attribution is known, it is stated. Where it is not, possibilities are noted and the record is left open. Correction is welcome.

Nothing survives that long on its own. Behind most of these objects is someone who repaired, rewired, reseated or reframed it, usually more than once and almost never recorded. Those trades are thinning out faster than the objects are. So we keep the Register, a free national record of Australia's menders, restorers and rare trades, open to anyone.

We work on land that holds the oldest continuing culture on earth. That is not a line to clear at the foot of a page. It is close to the reason the catalogue exists. First Nations and Indigenous practice sits at the centre of what KOBK is, the making that carried on through every attempt to end it. Where we hold First Nations or other cultural material we treat the practice and the materials as sacred, we research as far as we honestly can, we state what is known and leave the record open where it is not, and we take correction from the people whose history it is.

Part of what we do is look. Sometimes an object is misread, mislabelled, or written off. Catalogued as nothing when it is plainly something. We buy these to pull them back into the light and name them as honestly as we can.

KOBK is meant to be a platform, not only a shopfront. The catalogue is the visible part of it. The same work runs through research, through image, and through what happens in rooms. More passes through than the page can hold. There will be more on the shelf.

If you make, or you have something we should see, write to us.