Anne-Marie May first exhibited her coloured felt ray ‘paintings’ in the early 1990s at Store 5 in Melbourne, where she exhibited regularly with artists who shared common interests in geometric abstraction and conceptual art. Reflecting on her work from this period, May has stated: ‘By making assemblages from everyday materials, such as felt or denim, I was attempting to link the visual or pictorial experience to objects. I chose to work with the physical nature of materials specifically for their structural qualities – malleabilty, fusion, tension and mass – leading me to invent or appropriate processes from other disciplines, such as craft and design’.