IN THEIR OWN WORDS

“In their own words: Five women artists on their work in The National“, feature in Art Guide, 11 May 2023.

Four Sydney venues are currently exhibiting some of the most poignant, compelling and boundary-pushing works being made in Australia today. The National 4: Australian Art Now is showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art, Campbelltown Arts Centre and Carriageworks. Featuring scores of works across a multitude of forms, we asked five of the exhibiting artists—Amanda Williams, Diena Georgetti, Elizabeth Day, Heather B. Swann and Lynda Draper— to each tell us about the work they’re showing.

Elizabeth Day, The Flow of Form: There’s a Reason Beyond a Reason. Beyond That There’s a Reason (1797 Parramatta Gaol), Carriageworks, Redfern, 2023, unravelled op-shop garments, muslin, 2623 × 650 × 5 cm, irregular. Image courtesy of the artist. Photograph: Ben Allison.

Elizabeth Day at Carriageworks:

The Flow of Form: There’s a Reason Beyond a Reason, Beyond That There’s a Reason (1797 Parramatta Gaol), Carriageworks, Redfern uses the image of a prison, as an incision or wound on the landscape, to recognise the far-reaching implications of incarceration in Australia’s settlement through to today.

Animating the gallery wall at Carriageworks, the 26-metre-long textile is made from the unravelled tendrils of op shop jumpers and muslin. The life-size replication of the 1797 Parramatta Gaol door traces the ghosts of the past that are still alive in the present, gesturing towards the idea of colonial architecture as a proto-manifestation of the Anthropocene.

Working as a community- and site-based artist, I have presented projects at several historical sites that contain the residue of colonial damage, including at Cumberland Hospital, Westmead for Myco Logic, 2017; and in Longford, Tasmania, working alongside Anna Gibbs, Julie Gough and Noelene Lucas, for Crime Scene, 2019.

Attempting to address this damage, The Flow of Form interfaces with a personal and collective history and the impact of transgenerational trauma. It proposes the joyful possibility of activities of care, ‘unravelling’ this pervasive violence that still pervades culture.

https://artguide.com.au/in-their-own-words-five-women-artists-on-their-work-in-the-national/