Photograph
Book
Maker & role
Anne Ferran, Artist; Ms Anne Brennan, Author
Production date
1995
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Object detail
Title
Secure the shadow
Production place
Collection
Measurements
1:6, L: 54 x W: 57cm (L: 540 x W: 570mm); 7 - Book, H: 15 x W: 12.8cm (H: 150 x W: 128mm); 8 - Book, H: 17.5 x W: 17.6cm (H: 175 x W: 176mm); 9 - Book, H: 17.2 x W: 16.7cm (H: 172 x W: 167mm); 10 - Book, H: 17.1 x W: 17.7cm (H: 171 x W: 177mm); 11 - Folder, H: 17.2 x W: 17.5cm (H: 172 x W: 175mm); 12 - Box, H: 32.5 x W: 22.5 x D: 3cm (H: 325 x W: 225 x D: 30mm)
Signature & marks
-9 "Breathline 2" written in pencil on box. -10 has "Breathline 3
Credit line
Purchase, following the Artist in Residency programme jointly funded by Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales and the Australia Council, 1995
Corporate Collection, Museums of History New South Wales
Corporate Collection, Museums of History New South Wales
Description
Created for the exhibition 'Secure the Shadow' that examined the lives of female immigrants and their connection to the Hyde Park Barracks. Anne Ferran worked with Anne Brennan to create photographs and handmade books.
The artists’ installation Secure the Shadow was the first investigation by contemporary visual artists of the female inmates of the 19th-century Hyde Park Barracks Asylum and Immigrants’ Depot. Artists Anne Brennan and Anne Ferrran sifted through official records and surviving archaeological fragments to produce photographic works and a collection of hand-made books which offered an alternative story of silence and loss.
The Soft caps series was prompted after Ferran saw a women’s cotton cap in the Barracks archaeological collection and an 1886-1892 photograph of female inmates wearing the cap at Newington Asylum. Ferran’s pictures of empty caps evoke the invisibility of these women in the historical and archaeological record. Ferran and Brennan wrote:
‘We know more about the women now than at the outset, but not much more, since there is so little to learn. Little in the way facts and figures, and a lot of material evidence that is incoherent... Of the filthy rags in the collection, it turns out, surprisingly, that their muteness and formlessness is their eloquence. They tell us finally that there is no “story”, only fragments. Not “their” story any more, only our own story (about them).’
Brennan’s approach was driven by an investigation of the printed and written texts associated with the administration of the asylum and how these could illuminate the women’s obscurity. She described her books as ‘a layering of primary sources and fragments of my own voice’. Joan Kerr observed in her speech at the exhibition opening how Brennan ‘transforms the bleak official language into gently celebratory art books, while never denying the silences and emptiness of the original records’. Brennan and Ferran wrote:
‘The official records consist of tantalisingly brief entries in the ‘Register of Inmates, Government Asylum for the Infirm and Destitute’. Dates of admissions, releases and deaths, scant life histories. We read of Jane Chester, described by the matron as “a good woman, but an incorrigible drunkard”… The tone is detached, impersonal… What we have arrived at is a kind of imaginative connection, gradually and partially achieved… over time something of them has grown on us.’
The exhibition is significant as the Hyde Park Barracks Museum's first contemporary art installation and the product of the Historic Houses Trust's (later MHNSW) first substantial residency of visual artists to celebrate the International Year of Women. It is significant as a 1995 artistic interpretation of female occupation of the Barracks.
The artists’ installation Secure the Shadow was the first investigation by contemporary visual artists of the female inmates of the 19th-century Hyde Park Barracks Asylum and Immigrants’ Depot. Artists Anne Brennan and Anne Ferrran sifted through official records and surviving archaeological fragments to produce photographic works and a collection of hand-made books which offered an alternative story of silence and loss.
The Soft caps series was prompted after Ferran saw a women’s cotton cap in the Barracks archaeological collection and an 1886-1892 photograph of female inmates wearing the cap at Newington Asylum. Ferran’s pictures of empty caps evoke the invisibility of these women in the historical and archaeological record. Ferran and Brennan wrote:
‘We know more about the women now than at the outset, but not much more, since there is so little to learn. Little in the way facts and figures, and a lot of material evidence that is incoherent... Of the filthy rags in the collection, it turns out, surprisingly, that their muteness and formlessness is their eloquence. They tell us finally that there is no “story”, only fragments. Not “their” story any more, only our own story (about them).’
Brennan’s approach was driven by an investigation of the printed and written texts associated with the administration of the asylum and how these could illuminate the women’s obscurity. She described her books as ‘a layering of primary sources and fragments of my own voice’. Joan Kerr observed in her speech at the exhibition opening how Brennan ‘transforms the bleak official language into gently celebratory art books, while never denying the silences and emptiness of the original records’. Brennan and Ferran wrote:
‘The official records consist of tantalisingly brief entries in the ‘Register of Inmates, Government Asylum for the Infirm and Destitute’. Dates of admissions, releases and deaths, scant life histories. We read of Jane Chester, described by the matron as “a good woman, but an incorrigible drunkard”… The tone is detached, impersonal… What we have arrived at is a kind of imaginative connection, gradually and partially achieved… over time something of them has grown on us.’
The exhibition is significant as the Hyde Park Barracks Museum's first contemporary art installation and the product of the Historic Houses Trust's (later MHNSW) first substantial residency of visual artists to celebrate the International Year of Women. It is significant as a 1995 artistic interpretation of female occupation of the Barracks.
Accession number
HHT2002/1-1:12
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