Notes on the Castle, solo exhibition at Tin Sheds Gallery, 2004, 7-28 August 2004, Wilkinson Building, Faculty of Architecture, 148 City Road, University of Sydney, NSW 2006.
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. The delicacy of the knitted piece [The Fragility of Goodness] as system yields to explorations of institutional process, which are structured as much document-by-document as by sandstone stock. 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.
This film A Desire for Ancient History, 2004, was made for the exhibition “Notes on the Castle” at Tin Sheds Gallery. It was shown alongside a large-scale installation made of cardboard boxes of various sizes that were playfully representative of convict hewn stones that were used in early colonial architecture. Parallels were drawn between the prison and ancient castles with their crenellations, flying buttresses, fortress windows etc.
ELIZABETH DAY 