When “CityNews” snapper Gary Schafer caught up with Keen at The Street, she was busy perfecting space-age costumes for Cathy Petocz’s space-age detective play, “Where I End & You Begin” and playing with bits of potential space detritus in the form of hard, yellow foam.

Since she was first invited to come on board regularly by artistic director Caroline Stacey, Keen has been delighting audiences and winning critical notice with her inventive use of unexpected materials, textures and colours. Her sets sometimes envelope the actors, at other times ironically commenting on the stage action.

Keen has been around our theatres for a long time. She took a year off from her degree at the Canberra (now ANU) School of Art to help a cousin make costumes professionally, she created costumes and props for the late David Branson’s “Mysteries”, later designing for Jigsaw Theatre’s Greg Lissaman. During a six-year stint in Melbourne with her artist/academic partner, she designed costumes for the Fur Ball and other events.

Since her return to Canberra and joining The Street, she’s been happily combining motherhood with a full-on career designing costumes and sets.

It is this marriage of two design aspects that most excites Keen.

“I love doing both, it makes sense,” she says.

“It means you can sculpt what you are making.” she says “Where I End & You Begin,” poses particular challenges. Developed through The Street’s “Hive” and “First Seen” projects it is, well, different.

“I found this one difficult visually,” Keen tells me as she explains how she met Stacey’s brief to design an anti-gravity tank.

“This play is disembodied and the sounds of the words dominate over the meaning… yet it deals with real human concerns and there is beauty and joy in the written text… it’s like a concrete poem.”

It’s Petocz’s first full-length piece so, Keen says, “it is essential to listen carefully to the writer… it comes down to a lot of conversation.”

Petocz is constantly playing with the idea of “observing and being observed” so the audience will all sit on the main stage of The Street in a transverse arrangement, facing each other – that was Stacey’s idea.

Keen’s idea has been to cover the stage floor with white faux fur giving a sense of outer space and allowing the audience to “feel” the setting.

Few of her designs have been naturalistic and this one less than most. Her process is “a little bit experimental,” based in discussion and practical problem-solving, but her imaginative ideas are “sparked by visual culture generally – it all gets filed away I suppose.”

“I love the potential of spatial composition,” Keen says.

“Where I End & You Begin” at The Street, October 18-26. Bookings to thestreet.org.au or 6247 1223.