Don’t Sit on the Cake Table revisits the nostalgia of Australian birthday parties of the 1980s and 1990s: children running wild through backyards, cricket commentary filling the house, and women gathering in the kitchen to prepare the perfect celebration. Guided by the iconic Women’s Weekly Birthday Cake Book, these cakes became more than desserts—they were elaborate expressions of care, creativity, and the invisible labour expected of mothers.

Through a series of hand-built ceramic sculptures, McCurdie transforms these familiar cakes into absurd and unsettling objects. Slumping, sagging, and misbehaving, they use humour, visual puns, and sexual innuendo to explore the expectations embedded within domestic rituals and the construction of femininity and masculinity.

Extending beyond sculpture, the exhibition incorporates sound and installation, including a ceramic television broadcasting fragments of sexist 1990s Australian culture and an oversized puppet figure representing a familiar model of Australian masculinity: the absent father, detached from the domestic labour surrounding him.

By remaking temporary birthday cakes in clay, McCurdie turns fleeting memories into permanent objects. Don’t Sit on the Cake Table invites viewers to laugh, reminisce, and reconsider what was quietly being served alongside the cake.