Aarna Fitzgerald Hanley, excerpt from “What is close to us”, in The National 4: Australian Art Now, exhibition catalogue, published by Carriageworks, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Museum of Contemporary Art, 2023.
Elizabeth Day shows us how sustainable practices are ongoing and careful. She has made art for over 30 years while also working in prisons and mental healthcare spaces. The 26-metre-long The Flow of Form: There’s a Reason Beyond a reason. Beyond that That There’s a Reason (1797 Parramatta Gaol), Carriageworks, Redfern (2023), made onsite through Carriageworks’ artist residency program, offers a tender response to a hard history. Elizabeth started her ‘unravelling’ series with The Unravelling of Form (1996), a site-specific project that wrapped in wool the base of a railway viaduct. She has continued this process of pulling apart and rearranging tendrils of op shop woollens (saved from landfill), transforming them into mottled ‘paintings’. Her ‘unravellings’ are a way to unfurl personal and public histories. Animating the wall at Carriageworks, Elizabeth’s textile conjures the ‘prison on the landscape’ as an image of colonial Australia that persists today.
The National 4: Australian Art Now | 2023, exhibition catalogue (full) =>
ELIZABETH DAY 