Bringing light to the shadows

She's one of Australia's best-known photomedia artists, exhibiting regularly up and down the east coast and around the world, but WA has only just made it to her list.

Sydney-based Anne Ferran makes up for this omission in spades with her biggest exhibition of works to date, and the first in WA.

Anne Ferran: Shadow Land, is showing at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery as part of PIAF.

It surveys her career over the past 30 years where the beauty and brutality of women's lives since colonial times come under her thoughtful and analytical eye. Included is a new body of work based on research in the now empty prisoners' library at the heritage-listed Fremantle Prison during a residency at Fremantle Arts Centre last year.

Known for her work highlighting women in institutions, this is the first time Ferran has investigated an institution primarily for men, or depicted a WA heritage site.

She says the resulting book is intended to echo the homespun feel of the library. "Robert Hind, the librarian there for the last 20 years of the prison until 1991, was a prison officer and not a trained librarian but he was sympathetic to his prisoner readers, and ingenious in creating rosters and procedures for escorted groups of prisoners to visit the library."

Ferran wanted to bring together the residual energy of the prison library from the scattered physical and documentary evidence, using a semi-forensic approach.

With access to Hind's reports and a recorded oral history interview, intriguing insights bring the library to life.

"In the Post magazine, for instance, all prominent parts of a lady in bathing costume were stamped, Fremantle Prison each side of the slightly translucent paper to discourage prisoners from vandalising the publications by cutting out the pictures," Farren says.

She first began working with archives, historic sites and museum artefacts in the mid-1990s.

"A lot of my work is around institutionalisation. I don't exactly know why I'm drawn to it. I think it's because there's something unresolved there. Its always interesting for me when the records are incomplete and there's just a little detail to work with, which is the challenge."

Traces and remnants of history are evident throughout the remainder of the exhibition, from Ferran's images of a psychiatric hospital fallen into disuse, to reworked and cropped old black-and-white photos of patients and nurses.

Like many of her works, it's the ignored, and lesser-known history of sites attracting her attention. A large-scale video scrolls silently through a sad procession of the names of hundreds of babies who died in female convict prisons in Tasmania in the mid to late 1800s. Ferran says it's a classic example of little-known history.

"All the information that could be found about them was the cause of death, their names, when they were born and when they died. The names just kept coming - there were hundreds and hundreds of them in the archives. It's interesting nobody had done the research before to retrieve all the names from the records," Ferran says.

"The female convicts would basically get off the ship and they were in the community, because the whole place was a prison, but if they did something wrong, they had to go for what they called secondary punishment in an institution.

"Often the thing they did wrong was to get pregnant which is why so many babies were born there and weren't very well looked after. The whole thing was really pretty dreadful. Even though we know much more about convict history than our parents did, I don't think many people know about this. There's no trace they ever existed except these convict records."

An interactive set of drawers reveals lightboxes showing Ferran's images of historic clothing sourced from museums relating to women's reproductive lives. Included is postnatal binding, wrapped and tied around the waist to restore the figure, and an uncomfortable-looking-umbilical cord wrapper which was wrapped around the waist of newborns.

Large-scale photograms, reminiscent of X-rays in appearance, reveal ghostly floating christening dresses and a wedding gown, bringing history spectacularly to the fore. Ferran says the technique is old school.

"You take an object and put it directly on to light sensitive photographic paper and then expose the whole thing to light for a very short time and then process the paper. It means every image is exactly life size. I found it hard to give up making them because they're very seductive in that you don't know what the image will be until it comes out."

Her creative journey into the historic over decades invites exploration.

"We're not a culture that thinks a lot about its past, so the top layer of history can often erase the layers underneath. I'm interested in what remains of those layers and whether you can reactivate it."