Crossfires, group exhibition at Articulate Project Space, Sydney, 14 – 29 July 2018, curated by Barbara Halnan.
Artists: Ros Cook, Elizabeth Day, Adrian Hall, Barbara Halnan, Rose Ann McGreevy, Jacek Przybyszewski, Margaret Roberts, William Seeto and Gary Shaw.
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. Participating artists knew Rose, have worked and shown with her, and/or count her amongst those who have influenced their own thinking and art practice.
Keystone is part of an ongoing series Invisible Words/invisible Worlds about and within Australian institutions (originating in colonial history). It is constructed here out of images of convict hewn blocks, SEM images of carbon nanotubes & recycled sections of a textile made from The Unravelling of Form, a
work I made in 1995 when Rose and Barbara curated The Viaduct Project.
The prison on the Australian landscape and its unjust implications is considered including the Irish/British injustices in Tasmania. This work also references The Longford Project a post-colonial collaborative work with Anna Gibbs, Noelene Lucas and Julie Gough based on our shared genealogical and political connections. This work is about hidden stories.
Barbara had asked us to make work that connected to Rose Ann McGreevy. There are many ways I felt connected to Rose, but immersed at the time in my own geneaological links to Ireland, I produced a study into deep Irish links to Tasmania since the beginning of the colony when many convicts there were Irish. For me The Longford Project enables an uncovering of some very disturbed memories of the state and its dark history.
ELIZABETH DAY 