Cosmic campground

A giant peppermill is a central point in Hany Armanious' installation.

The white muslin sheik's tent upstairs in the New Gallery makes for an extraordinary Arabian fantasy. Like a dream gone awry, nothing is quite as it seems and examining any of the many objects will result in unexpected tangents in theme.

Emblazoned across the entrance are cutout beach towels, providing caricatured camels and forming the word Arabba.

The floor is sprinkled with peppercorns, presumably from the ceiling-high ceramic peppergrinder that rises up from a potter's wheel and forms the tent's centrepole. A collection of smaller grinders and grinder-shaped lamps sprawl their baroque minarets across a table like an eastern cityscape, and bell shapes are strewn across another curved table.

Capping the installation is a pointed horn speaker at the tent's tip, playing Middle-Eastern-sounding muzac renditions of Abba songs.

The best and easiest way to dissect Hany Armanious' work is to trace his process from the project's inception, when the 42-year old Egyptian-born Australian artist took a residency at Auckland University's Elam School of Fine Arts early last year. "It's a pretty linear process I've employed for this project," he says. "You find things and you turn them on and you go down that road and eventually the whole thing gets unified under the one tent."

Although his work may appear whacky - an easy conclusion to draw if you saw the giant muffins at the Govett Brewster's Bloom exhibition last year - he denies any presence of humour in his work.

And although his tongue must surely have slipped into his cheek, to merely see his work as funny would be to overlook the sophisticated associations he extracts obliquely from his materials, the outcomes of playful working strategies.

Working mainly in the art school foundry, Armanious started by trying to recreate the interior shape of a bell by casting in aluminium and pewter.

Casting is a process that fascinates him. In particular, he enjoys the seemingly futile task of trying to depict the hidden interiors or negative spaces of an object.

Particularly paradoxical are his attempts to reveal the hidden or internal materiality of substances like water. By pouring casting materials such as pewter or hot-melt into them he creates - by displacement - cavities. This echoes the occult ritual of pouring hot pewter into water to create forms that can be read similarly to tealeaves.

In this case, as well as the bell shapes, Armanious has poured polyurethane into large peppercorn sacks, resulting in lumpy, sluggish forms that rise, in snake-charmer fashion, from the sea of pepper on the floor. These forms support the tables, which resemble sci-fi consoles and suggest some sort of flying carpet-powered UFO.

This random way of generating forms is similar to the Surrealists' experiments with "automatic drawing", a movement Armanious says he is in love with - although he doesn't buy into their grand schemes of using automatism to tap into either the artist's subconscious or the collective subconscious.

It has been said that Armanious seems more intent on eliminating the artist, allowing the process and the materials to reveal themselves and make the decisions.

His attempts at trying to mould the inside of a bell were complicated by its clapper getting in the way and when he was casting the horn shapes he was reminded of the spindle that gets in the way when trying to pour peppercorns into a mill. "So I started thinking about the peppermill form."

The peppermills evolved into candles - the wick becoming the spindle - and lamps while the medium shifted into wax and clay.

"I hadn't used clay before and I didn't know how to throw, but I managed to master the technique and throw an enormous clay peppermill. That required a bit of scaffolding and a lot of climbing around and careful balancing and then firing it.

"It was a nightmare but I've been nominated for a ceramic award," he laughs.

The phallic implications of what he was doing did not escape him and there are references to Hindu fertility symbols, cosmic rituals - and 1970s key parties.

His hybrid approach of distorting origins, associations and culture also blends cosmology, crop circles and even disco, as found in the accompanying soundtrack, which is reminiscent of Senor Coconut's album of Brazilian versions of songs by German electronic group Kraftwerk.

"The music again is like balancing two extreme cultures. This idea of centring and getting right in the middle, which is somehow impossible - the impossibility of finding the middle. It just seemed to be a good combination of extreme popular cultures."

That leads us to the exhibition's title: "As far as I'm concerned, the centre of the universe does talk about trying to find this impossible centrality but it's also about the artist being the centre of the universe. When someone makes work, you are the most important person as an artist in your own studio in your own mind - I think we need to be honest about that."

*What: Centre of the Universe (Central Core/Hard Core/Soft Core), by Hany Armanious

*Where and when: New Gallery, to Jan 30