Elizabeth Day

This work is part of an ongoing series 2018-25 called 'the prison on the landscape' that addresses the arrival in Australia of British law and its attendant institutions and administrations. This work, like most in this series uses unravelled opportunity shop garments, muslin and stitching. Many of the works in this series reference colonial architecture, using structures and surfaces as reference points, and a way to work with the original traumatic incursion in the form of prisons,. The prison remains a space of shame and silences, and obscrured damage. I collect photographs of various styles of stone chipping and these are drawings from those pictures.




The building of prisons was one of the reasons that Australia was settled. Convicts were the workforce in the construction of this country and I am interested in the abstract linear quality of the marks that were made by these annonymous creators during that early period of white settlement.