Elizabeth Day: Invisible Words / Invisible Worlds – solo exhibition at The Barracks Arts Centre, New Norfolk (Derwent Valley Arts, TAS), curated by Sean Kelly, 10 Jun – 23 July 2023.
Elizabeth Day makes large wall works using unravelled and knitted garments that explore the ‘prison on the landscape’ – in particular, gaols and asylums – and how they impact the present. In doing so, her art engages with the mechanics of understanding events, incidents, stories and feelings, through iterative processes of observation, revelation and resolution. MORE…
The National 4: Australian Art Now – major installation at Carriageworks, Eveleigh, curated by Aarna Fitzgerald Hanley and Freja Carmichael, 30 Mar – 25 Jun 2023.
THE NATIONAL is a biennial survey of contemporary Australian art. The National 4: Australian Art Now brings together 48 new artists projects involving more than 80 artists across Country, generations and communities. A partnership between four leading Sydney cultural institutions: the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Campbelltown Arts Centre (C-A-C), Carriageworks and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia). MORE…
Facing the Dark – solo exhibition at Articulate Project Space, Sydney, 7 – 22 Nov 2020.
This experimental new body of work is part of Elizabeth Day’s ongoing project The Prison on the Landscape. These works are a reflection on the line or the wall as the meeting of British and Aboriginal Law as manifested early in Australia’s history with the arrival of the prison here. The prison is an institution that continues in a variety of forms to perpetuate that cultural divide. MORE…
Ngurra (Place) – group exhibition at The Stores Building Project, Parramatta Gaol, 2020 (postponed due to Covid-19 restrictions).
This exhibition features works by individual makers Elizabeth Day, Anne Graham, Joe Wilson & Chanelle Collier, Tony Bond and Michael Petchkovsky. It will also include an AAP collective ‘Ngurra gallery build’ project by Graham Davis King and Billy Gruner, assisted variously by members of the Deerubbin community. MORE…
Older Than Language – group exhibition at The Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, 16 Jun – 8 Aug 2020.
Older Than Language is the Salamanca Arts Centre’s major exhibition and public program for 2020. Curated by Nina Miall and featuring 32 artists from across the country, the exhibition and its accompanying series of talks, performances and community events explore the contemporary migrant experience within Australia today. MORE…
Haus Werk: The Bauhaus in Contemporary Art – group exhibition at McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery, VIC, 24 Nov 2019 – 15 Mar 2020.
Haus Werk affirms the relevance of methods first grounded in the Bauhaus, and explores the way these concepts have new applications across different locations and times. The title refers to the way our understanding of the Bauhaus has become entwined with domestic space, with particular emphasis on the influence of the female artists who were relegated to the weaving workshop. Acknowledging the production of artwork as both a form of labour and a kind of play, the project encourages a fluid understanding of these states of production. MORE…
Working in the Trouble: Prison Wall on the Road to Parramatta – solo exhibition at Articulate Project Space, 4 – 20 Oct 2019.
Working in the Trouble: Prison Wall on the Road to Parramatta, is an exhibition based on Day’s 25 years working in marginal spaces. In 2011 she began developing work along the Parramatta River where there are the remains of colonial prisons and institutions, that continue into the 20th (and 21st) century to be a focus for mental health services. Much of her work has considered the image of ‘the prison on the landscape’ as a way to focus the damage on the Australian landscape wrought by colonisation. MORE…
The Longford Project – collaboration between Elizabeth Day, Anna Gibbs, Julie Gough and Noelene Lucas, residencies and exhibitions, 2012-ongoing (Ten Days on the Island festival, SCA Galleries, Articulate, Tasmania International Arts Festival, Bundanon Trust, University of Tasmania).
The Longford Project is an ongoing collaborative group that has been investigating the intersection of family and cultural histories and the tensions surrounding the group’s personal connection to Longford, Tasmania. The project has manifested through residencies developing collaboration, community immersion and critical dialogues between the Longford community, Indigenous peoples, artists, writers & curators, and has presented a number of exhibitions. MORE…
The Fragility of Goodness: Abstraction, Abjection and Activism – solo exhibition at Moonah Arts Centre, 24 Aug – 15 Sept 2018.
The Fragility of Goodness: Abstraction, Abjection and Activism is part of artist Elizabeth Day’s ongoing series Discontinued Narratives of Migration. These works mark the forces always in play; that sully, deconstruct and de-territorialise whiteness. Reflecting upon trans-generational trauma, these haunted and haunting “drawings” are not only inscriptions, but are uncanny, cryptic, abject and activist performances. MORE…
Crossfires – group exhibition at Articulate Project Space, Sydney, 14 – 29 July 2018.
Crossfires is a group exhibition curated by Barbara Halnan based around the connections between artists, especially with each artist’s connection with artist and colleague Rose Ann McGreevy who died in 2014. Part of the curatorial rationale is to continue the sequence of exhibitions facilitated jointly between Barbara Halnan and Rose Ann McGreevy in the years before her death. It is also to explore the passing on, communication of thinking and techniques that happens in all the art forms. MORE…
Myco Logic / Mycelia – in group exhibitions 2015-2018: Group Drawing Show, Factory49 (2018); Floor Works, Articulate Project Space (2015); and Conny Dietzschold Gallery (2015).
Documentation of Myco Logic in other group exhibitions. Group Drawing Show, Factory49, Sydney (2018). Artists Mark Brown, Pia Larsen, Gail Kenning, Lisa Sharp, Sepideh Farzem, Elizabeth Day, and Michelle le Dain. Floor Works, Articulate Project Space, Sydney (2015) curated by India Zegan. Artists: Heidi Abraham, Linden Braye, Loma Bridge, Elizabeth Day, Nicole Ellis, Lynne Eastaway, Beata Geyer, Chantal Grech, Justin Henderson, Hana Hoogedeure and Julian Woods. Conny Dieztschld Gallery (2015). MORE…
Everything is Connected to Everything Else: Myco Logic – aggregated exhibition in Heritage Courtyard Pavilion, Parramatta Justice Precinct, 14 – 21 Oct and 25 Nov – 3 Dec 2017.
This exhibition presented an installation by Elizabeth Day of the evolving participatory project Myco Logic, whose inception was in Kandos, NSW, as part of Cementa15. Day extended this project through a community arts program she facilitated at Cumberland Hospital. The exhibition in Parramatta Justice Precinct’s Heritage Courtyard Pavilion presents artwork aggregated from community workshops at Cumberland Hospital and previous iterations of Myco Logic. MORE…
Myco Logic – community arts and cultural development program, Cumberland Hospital, Westmead / Parramatta North, Jun – Oct 2017.
This community arts and cultural development program built on the evolving participatory project, Myco Logic, originally facilitated by Elizabeth Day for Cementa15. The project engaged participants in an innovative arts and health program, fostering connections between contributors and strengthening their support networks in the process of making fungi-inspired artwork together. At the heart of Myco Logic is a creative exchange based on the image of fungi and their underground interconnected mycelial root structures. MORE…
Invisible Words Invisible Worlds – solo exhibition in Heritage Courtyard Pavilion, Parramatta Justice Precinct, 14 – 21 Oct and 25 Nov – 3 Dec 2017.
The works in the ongoing series Invisible Words Invisible Worlds are responses to the aggregation of institutions in Parramatta North – including Cumberland Hospital’s East Campus on the site of the Female Factory and Asylum, Parramatta Gaol, the Norma Parker Centre and the Parramatta Girls Home – and Day’s experience as an prison educator over the past 25 years. The series can be read as an ethical commentary on the abuse that has been inflicted there. Day is particularly interested in how trauma can be readily experienced and passed down through generations. MORE…
Invisible Words Invisible Worlds, 2016 – 2017 – residency with the Centre for Organic Electronics, University of Newcastle.
In 2016-2017 Elizabeth Day was supported by an Australia Council Career Development Grant to undertake a residency with the Centre for Organic Electronics at the University of Newcastle, using electron microscopy to image carbon nano-tubes. MORE…
CEMENTA15: Myco Logic – contemporary art festival, Kandos, NSW, Sydney, 9 – 12 Apr 2015.
Cementa15 offered an expanded program with over 60 artists exhibiting work across more than 20 venues. Artists engaged with not only Kandos, but the regional context in which we are situated. Elizabeth Day’s installation Myco Logic, in Kandos Community Centre Hall, brought together the work of a community-based mushroom-making collective, which embraced fungi’s rhizomatic networks of intercommunicating mycelia as representative of social cohesion. MORE…
E.M.D. (exposed to moral danger) – group exhibition at the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct, 10 – 18 May 2014.
An exhibition of artworks created by Parramatta Female Factory Precinct (PFFP) Memory Project artists. Working from the instructional block of the former Parramatta Girls Home, PFFP Memory Project has brought together artists, historians and Parragirls in a social history and contemporary art project centred on the historic institutions of the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct. E.M.D (exposed to moral danger) is the result of a yearlong engagement in interpreting the site, its legacy and the experience of institutionalisation. MORE…
Drawing Lines in the Sand – group exhibition on Cockatoo Island, 19 Feb – 18 Mar 2012.
Drawing Lines in the Sand presented six large-scale installation projects that engaged with various aspects of Cockatoo Island’s institutional heritage and topography. They considered the island as a historic, tangible place and a symbolic space more broadly. What connects them is a reflection on conditions of interiority and exteriority in a uniquely Australian context. MORE…
The Law is not always just – solo exhibition at Conny Dietzschold Gallery, Sydney (2011).
This exhibition reflects on being caught up in the idea and process of migration, mutation and transplantation. MORE…
Liverpool/Liverpool: The Skin of Translation – solo exhibition at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Liverpool, NSW, and Dickens Gallery, St. George’s Hall, as part of the Liverpool Biennial, UK (2010).
Two exhibitions titled ‘Liverpool/ Liverpool: The Skin of Translation’ by Elizabeth Day were shown almost simultaneously in September 2010 at St George’s Hall in Liverpool UK and in Liverpool, Australia. This fortuitous synchronicity of Liverpool/Liverpool (the shows overlapped for a month) consolidates the circuit of sending and return that characterises the colonial relation. MORE…
The Earth Works – solo exhibition at Conny Dietzschold Gallery, Sydney (2008).
Elizabeth Day sometimes refers to herself as a short story writer. That’s because as well as the ongoing co-mingling of text, textures and textiles in her inventive process-oriented works, she thinks this is a useful way of talking about how the works move across, interweave and reconfigure several interrelated themes. MORE…
Artspace 24/25 – exhibition at Artspace, Sydney (2008).
To mark twenty-five years of operation Artspace presents a set of special projects: Twenty-four one-hour exhibitions. Twenty-five years of Artspace. Twenty-four artists present one-hour solo exhibition projects. Accumulatively Artspace 24/25 provides an opportunity to engage with a diversity of contemporary practices and treats the gallery as an active working space, a place in which artists think, intuit, experiment and make. MORE…
Making and Breaking Pattern – group exhibition at Carnegie Gallery, Hobart (2007) and University of Newcastle Gallery (2008).
Pattern is a regular or repetitive form, generally involving types of order and arrangement. Patterns are made according to certain rules; however through a making and breaking of the rules of pattern making, the conceptual realm of the artist’s intention is revealed. Pattern becomes a vehicle for expressing Variation. MORE…
Our Lucky Country – group exhibitions and residency at Hazlehurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, Sutherland, 2006-2008.
The first exhibition in Dec 2006, titled Our Lucky Country (difference), examined and responded to issues of identity, trust, culture and community. The second exhibition in the series in 2007-2008, titled Our Lucky Country (still different), sees the same group of 16 artists commissioned to make new work that articulates an understanding of cultural difference in the community. MORE…
The Trouble with the Weather: a Southern Response – group exhibition at UTS Gallery, 3 July – 30 Aug 2007.
Changing weather has spelt trouble before. But now the trouble is that we don’t quite know what to make of it, and it feels urgent. This exhibition brings together artists to provide a southern response to the trouble with the weather—aesthetically, conceptually, discursively, pataphysically. MORE…
Art and the Age of Accountancy – solo exhibition, Factory49, Sydney, 2007.
Art in the age of accountancy is a formal development of a previous work notes on the castle (2005) at the University of Sydney Tin Sheds Gallery. Elizabeth Day used a range of media including cardboard boxes reminiscent of sandstone blocks in constructions which address the architectural links and attendant colonial attitudes inherent in the Australian prisons that draw their forms from the European castle. MORE…
View from the Sixty-Third Floor – Helen Lempriere Award finalist, Werribee Park, Victoria, 2007.
Installation of Elizabeth Day’s View from the Sixty-Third Floor at Werribee Park, Victoria, as part of the Helen Lempriere Sculpture Award, of which it was a finalist. MORE…
Dillwynia Garden Project – Dillwynia Women’s Correctional Centre, NSW (with community artists from Dillwynia), 2002-2007.
The Dillwynia Garden Project is a project I facilitated in my role as a teacher working across Creative Arts, Horticulture and Aboriginal Studies courses at Dillwynia Women’s Correctional Centre. The participating Aboriginal women designed gardens to reclaim the land under the centre. The gardens have been maintained and modified by successive community artists and continue to bring the women together. MORE…
For Matthew and Others: Journeys with Schizophrenia – group exhibition at Campbelltown Arts Centre, 1 Sept – 21 Oct 2006, (also at Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre).
For Matthew and Others told, through visual, performing and literary arts the difficulties and joys experienced by people living with schizophrenia as well as their families and friends. MORE…
Seven Beauties, group exhibition, Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney, curated by Robert Lake, 2 – 23 April 2005.
A survey show of artwork by seven artists that examines their impact on the Sydney art scene over the past 15 years. With Lisa Andrew, Mishka Borowski, Sadie Chandler, Maria Cruz, Elizabeth Day, Sarah Goffman and Elizabeth Pulie. MORE…
View from the Sixty-Third Floor – commission for Sculpture by the Sea, Port Arthur, Tasmania, 2005.
Installation of Elizabeth Day’s View from the Sixty-Third Floor at Port Arthur, as part of Sculpture by the Sea, Tasmania. This installation excavated and recognised a grave on the site. MORE…
View from the Sixty-Third Floor – commission for Sculpture by the Sea, Sydney, 2005.
Installation of Elizabeth Day’s View from the Sixty-Third Floor on the cliffs near Bondi Beach, as part of Sculpture by the Sea, Sydney. The installation recognises that development on this site and others along the cliff tops have erased and covered rock art by generations of the area’s Traditional Owners. MORE…
Notes on the Castle – solo exhibition at Tin Sheds Gallery, University of Sydney, 2004.
In Notes from the Castle, as suggested by the Kafkaesque overtones in the title, Elizabeth Day’s target is systems of another order: bureaucracy, power, institutions and incarceration. Cardboard building blocks, standing as ersatz stone, stack up with blocks of paper files to form the systems common to institutions and incarceration. Day exposes the castle as a bizarre imported process-package, which has been grafted onto the Australian landscape. MORE…
View from the Sixty-Third Floor – Sculpture in the City, Martin Place, Sydney, 2004.
Installation of Elizabeth Day’s View from the Sixty-Third Floor in Martin Place, Sydney, alongside Anne Graham’s permanent installation and fountain, on the site of a colonial laundry and under the shadow of the colonial Sydney Hospital. MORE…
The Fragility of Goodness – solo exhibition, Conny Dietzschold Gallery, Sydney, 2004.
The Fragility of Goodness consisted of an open-ended structure of white wool knitted into a form of delicate, but haphazard, organic dimensions. Emblematic of chance and randomness, it was the paradoxical product of the strict repetition of knitting-as-process [knit a row purl a row], reminiscent of biological or genetic programming, while evolving without a blueprint. MORE…
View from the Sixty-Third Floor – solo exhibition at CAST, Hobart, 2000.
Installation of Elizabeth Day’s View from the Sixty-Third Floor at CAST, Hobart, 2000. MORE…
View from the Sixty-Third Floor: SYDNEY!VIENNA! – exhibition at The Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, 2000.
Installation of Elizabeth Day’s View from the Sixty-Third Floor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, 2000, in the exhibition SYDNEY!VIENNA!, curated by Anita Fricek. MORE…
The Origin of Ideas – Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada, 2000.
The Origin of Ideas exhibition and archive began as a way to examine the processes of creativity itself, exploring the intimate reality of how ideas come into being and exist as mobile changing living entities. The exhibition looked at visual and aural works across many spheres and disciplines, investigating the ways in which ideas are interwoven and cross-pollinate. It looked at links between art, architecture, science and technology. A selection of important artists and thinkers across genders and cultures were chosen to demonstrate the processes of the generation of ideas. MORE…
View from the Sixty-Third Floor – solo exhibition at Artspace, Sydney, 1998.
Installation of Elizabeth Day’s View from the Sixty-Third Floor in a solo exhibition at Artspace, Sydney, curated by Nicholas Tsoutas. MORE…
The Unravelling of Form – The Viaduct Project, Glebe, 1995.
Installation of Elizabeth Day’s Unravelling of Form, 1995, in Annandale Park, Glebe (Sydney). Curated by Barbara Halnan and Rose Ann McGreevy. “Works such as The Unravelling of Form present an “off the rectangle” assault on the history and ideology of rectilinear thinking. These exhibitions are characterised by their wildly frozen ejaculations of wool and unrelated accumulations of objects. Out of this discord a dialogue results which stands in opposition to a productivist mechanism of symbolic exchange.” MORE…
The Destiny of Objects – exhibition at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, 1995; Contemporary Artspace Alice Springs, 1998; Conny Dieztschold Gallery, 2003.
This image was produced for Casula Powerhouse in 1995. The image is of a market with objects bought at local shopping centres and markets. Mixed objects on market tables and on Judy Watson’s floor. MORE…
ELIZABETH DAY 