The Big Red Chair

The photograph it produces is the entire design. Sit in it and you are rendered child-sized – the oldest and most reliable trick in the oversized-object repertoire, and one that a chair achieves more directly than any other subject because everyone already knows exactly how large a chair should be.

Charleville is a substantial Warrego town in south-west Queensland with a strong tourism programme built on things the district actually has: dark skies and the Cosmos Centre, bilbies, and the vortex guns installed in 1902 in an attempt to shoot rain out of the sky, which failed comprehensively and are still standing.

Against that, a red chair is the least locally specific object the town owns, which is presumably the point – it commits to nothing and photographs well.

This is the catalogue's second Big Red Chair, the other being a furniture store's landmark on the Warrego Highway at Withcott, seven hundred kilometres east along the same road. Two red chairs on one highway, unconnected, is a good illustration of how the form travels.

Charleville also holds the Big Cigarette, indoors at a motel reception.

No one recorded what it is made from, the installation date, any attribution and any figures for its size.