As a multi-media artist, Caroline McCarthy is concerned with the opposing duality of surface versus function within the sphere of everyday consumer goods. Challenging our perceptions, she de-contextualises familiar objects by separating them from their usual environment to relocate them elsewhere. Once stripped of their former identity, the objects’ function and design are reconsidered in a refreshed light.

Her photograph entitled Still Life (2003) is a case in point. At a glance from a distance, it resembles a painting of fruits on a dining table. A closer look reveals it to be a cleverly crafted construction of paper maché sculptures fabricated from dampened loo paper, positioned on cardboard boxes draped with dustbin bags. Actual loo rolls serve as extra props.

The work was informed by seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painters, such as Jan Davidsz de Heem and Abraham van Beyeren, whose period was interested in ideas about consumption and excess. Fast forward four centuries and the vast range of multi-coloured loo paper sold in supermarkets across the UK speaks of excessive consumer choice for even the most basic of household items.

Addressing these parallels, Still Life incorporates two types of cycles – that of loo paper being transformed into food (the human waste of which it was created for) and how the use of photography gives permanent documentation to something ephemeral so that the work returns to the reference point that inspired it.

“When it’s wet, loo paper is very malleable and colourful, and it’s possible to overlap the sheets to make new colours,” McCarthy, 33, explains. “So in a sense, I was very aware of this material being paint-like. It was somewhere between being sculpture and painting because the colours were overlapping. The colours prompt you to forget what it is and allude to ideas of nature. I’m interested in colour as artifice. My only hope is that the process of photography captured what was in front as closely as possible,”

She believes that photography, like painting, adds an authority. People stand back respectfully to observe the frozen image, rather than approaching it up-close with a desire to touch, as they would with an installation or sculpture.

Her series entitled From the Testors Military Range (2002) similarly relates to how the perversion of appearance prompts different readings and reactions. For this, McCarthy painted detergent bottles, cornflake boxes and take-away pizza packaging grey or black so they would imitate high-tech goods. Displayed on glass shelving in Parker’s Box Gallery in New York, the look-a-like cameras, lenses, film equipment and laptop computers were so well camouflaged that passing policemen demanded to see a retail license.

“There was an element here that made people stop in their tracks because it dissolved initial recognition and function, demanding a double-take because it appeared to be something else. When you take something that’s so present in our day-to-day life and put it through a process where you de-familiarise it, people find it really difficult to recognise. People have acquired reading and understanding of objects whereby everything exists within systems of recognition and value and is coded as such. Somehow that forms our expectations of things, which is actually quite thin and can be manipulated or played with. I try to unbalance or upset that in some way, or play with those ideas.”

Another observation was how photographed packs of ready-made meals invariably feature garnish as a decorative cliché to trigger an expectation of healthy food. The garnish is used to qualify a seal of approval or quality. For her installation Promise (2004), McCarthy cut out the garnishes and stuck them vertically onto the tops of the packaging that she had placed in ceramic plant pots. Exhibited at the Whitechapel Art Gallery last year, the amassed pots with upwardly pointing greenery denoted a greenhouse effect. A subtle critique of manipulative marketing techniques, it again challenged illusion versus actuality. The exhibit is being re-shown at a group photography show called To Be Continued, sponsored by the British Council, in Helsinki Kunsthalle in October. Through exploring the paradoxes between surface and function, and design and content, McCarthy interrogates and pushes, urging more reflection beyond misguided, shallow notions of representation.