Safe Space exhibition
30 Nov - 10 Dec, 2023

107 Redfern

Explored the impact of gender-based violence in our community during 16 Days of Activism, a worldwide campaign to eliminate gender-based violence. 

Safe Space supported the Redfern-based feminist, grassroots organisation the Women’s and Girls’ Emergency Centre (WAGEC) by donating 50% of profits from sales of photographic prints and wearable sculpture

An artist talk and free two-hour gender-based violence bystander and ally community workshop took place on Sunday 10 December (Human Rights Day). Delivered by WAGEC, the workshop supported community understand the root causes and safely intervene.

Installation view at 107, Redfern
Images (C) Sarah Malone

Safe Space
2023
58 cocoon like forms made from white bedsheets, flexible porcelain, salvaged fabrics, plaster, concrete, latex, beeswax, resin, hair, fingernails, casuarina pine needles, cockatoo feather, paint, sculpted glass teeth, audio tape, steel chain, flowers, sand, felting wool, polyester fill, BBQ sauce, milk, found keys, plastic chain, padlock, menstrual blood, fishnet stockings, sewing pins, found covid-19 playground closure tape, hi-vis tape, leaf litter, chicken wire, glass jar and cat bowl.
10.8 x 4 x 4.2m

Safe Space primarily employs used white bedsheets sourced from the artist’s Marrickville pay-it-forward Facebook group, the material history of these sheets is evidenced through the stains, rips, and discolouration ingrained in their weave by the original owners. 

These cocoon-like forms serve as a conceptual metaphor for the body that is ordinarily a place of safety. However, after violence, abuse, or trauma inflicted on the body, it no longer feels as safe as it once was, but at the same time, it’s completely inescapable.

These forms hang from the ceiling as though frozen in time, the total reflecting the number of women lost to violence so far in 2023 according to the researchers from Counting Dead Women Australia, of Destroy the Joint. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the count rose from 54, to 58 women killed due to gender-based violence. 

Safe Space joins a rich lineage of art by women artists Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, and Karla Dickens, who share similar material and conceptual interests. 

Drawing on personal experience, as well as research and studio practice, Safe Space distils multiple texts including Jess Hill’s “See What You Made Me Do”, Chanel Miller’s “Know My Name: A Memoir”, Soraya Chemaly’s “Rage Becomes Her”, Amani Haydar’s “The Mother Wound” and Joanna Bourke’s “Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence”, as well as learnings obtained through the Women’s and Girls’ Emergency Centre’s domestic violence active-bystander and ally training.

return to nature
2023
Digital photographic series, giclee prints on Ilford cotton rag, signed by the artist.

A2 prints, framed in raw oak, edition of one.
A3 prints, 420 x 297mm, unframed, edition of five.

Opposite Safe Space, return to nature and positive/negative seek to interpret the powerful, grief laden forms of Safe Space within new contexts.

In the photographic series return to nature the artist frees these cocoon like forms in quintessential Australian landscapes, connecting them to Country with an expansive outlook – like the body finally able to release a held breath. 

Within the exhibition, the duality of the closed fist is examined: as an instinctual response to fear, and as a deliberate act of power. 

In positive/negative the fist is a symbol of strength and resistance that draws on the long history of the raised fist in activism movements throughout the 20th century spanning the labour, Bla(c)k Power, feminist, and liberation movements. 

These wearable sculptures can be used as a necklace, displayed in the home, and attached to keys or a bag. Each comes with a numbered certificate, signed by the artist. By wearing this you are acting in solidarity with the movement to end gender-based violence within a generation. 

positive/negative
2023
polymer clay, stainless steel fastening and chain, 120 x 20 x 20mm (approx.) 100 individual pieces.