As a performer in a group called Frumpus, I sometimes donned huge false plastic teeth, a wig, a fake plastic bottom and a tight red tracksuit to prowl the building’s corridors in the name of theatre.

One night in 2001, for an experimental theatre night called Look Mum No Head, I joined my Frumpus colleagues in a long white nightie and bonkers blonde wig to pirouette slowly on a raised platform as fake blood dribbled down my mouth and across my chest. Nearby, a woman dressed as a nurse injected red liquid into plastic bubble sheeting to make a self-portrait while a woman in a huge wig and deer antlers laughed like a hyena.

It was performance-art bliss and felt like the centre of the art universe.

Afterwards, when we had scrubbed off the fake blood and put on normal clothes for a party that went until dawn, we took a guided tour of the Imperial Slacks space.

The artists – or Slackers as they were known – had a living room (potted palm tree, dark teal walls, multiple second-hand couches), kitchen (two fridges, a pink cupboard, one toaster, really ugly mugs) and bedrooms.

The latter were thrilling, art-filled enclaves emitting the personality of each artist. Neat or ramshackle, with mattresses on milk crates, clothes hung on metal pipe racks and, in one, phallic bedside lamps made from translucent pink plastic. They exuded creative prowess, savvy frugality and sex.

“This is Shaun’s,” someone said, looking at Gladwell’s rumpled bed in slight awe. Later, we found Shaun, in another room, with someone else, and hustled quickly away, whooping in embarrassment.

Everyone had a crush on at least one Slacker. The building – when was not nurturing artists to lead successful and significant careers – was a hotbed of lust and love.

Now Imperial Slacks is reforming for a retrospective co-curated by Campbelltown Arts Centre director Michael Dagostino​ and Nicholas Tsoutas​, a lecturer at the Sydney College of the Arts. Tsoutas says the collective were “unmaking the rules” as they went along.

“They had this idea of a collective but they didn’t really know what a collective was,” he says. “The excitement of youth. The genuine excitement that they were feeling the world and inventing it at the same time. These sound nights, performance nights and interventions into the city just emerged. They weren’t planned because the government said, ‘Oh you’ve got to give us a program, here’s your money’. It was, ‘We want to do it so we do it’. And I think that’s radical.

“They f—ed, made art, drank, slept and contributed to the living community of the city.”

Cosmic Love Wonder Lust it features existing works and newly commissioned pieces across two sites, the Campbelltown Arts Centre and Sydney College of the Arts Galleries.

Corderio and Healey are creating a work featuring the fuselage of an aeroplane, sewn onto the wall with crochet, while Cooper’s work will incorporate clothing from each of the Slackers.

Fox, whose sculptures have included a vertically suspended Suzuki Sierra, is presenting three works. They include Instrument and Drawings, a wearable armour-like piece which creates drawings built out of body movement.

In August 2002, after steady rent increases became too high to manage, Imperial Slacks closed with Slacking Off, a week-long exhibition.

“We moved out at the right time,” Fox says. “We were at a really formative stage in our lives back then, with all those shared resources and support. Most of us are still close. Working together on this, such a long time after we were a collective together, has been great. Opening night, it’s going to be pretty amazing.”

Cosmic Love Wonder Lust is at Campbelltown Arts Centre, August 14 – October 18, and Sydney College of the Arts, August 13-September 12.