Review: ‘Anne Ferran: Box of Birds’ at Stills Gallery, Sydney

Exhibition dates: 26th June – 27th July 2013

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tar·ant·ism [tar-uhn-tiz-uhm]
noun
a mania characterized by an uncontrollable impulse to dance, especially as prevalent in southern Italy from the 15th to the 17th century, popularly attributed to the bite of the tarantula.

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I have never been a great fan of Anne Ferran’s exhumations. Her digging into the ground of history and restoring, reviving (after neglect or a period of forgetting) traces of life and bringing them into light (through photography) – bringing them back to light – has resulted in images that are paradoxically pretty, lifeless. For example, photographs of patches of grass in Lost to Worlds (2008) are given great import as contemporary evidence of the site of a female convict prison, near the small village of Ross, Tasmania as Ferran, “continues to play with the invisibility of this specific history, using large-scale photographs to show what little remains today, and to collectively reflect on the difficulty of grasping a ruined and fragmented past.”

And… so… what else?

These photographs really mean very little, another example of an artist picking at the scab of history to what end, what purpose, other than to dig up deleted histories that are past their use by date. Move on, move on, nothing to see here!

And there is literally nothing to see, except patches of grass that are given import by the contextualisation of the artist, the “look at this, I think it is important because I have seen it, because I have researched it, because I am an artist, because I am aware” – when the interrogation actually means very little. It is like the prevalence of contemporary photographs of empty, abandoned spaces – abandoned petrol stations, hospitals, insane asylums – that are supposed to impart great poetry and narrative to the spaces. Ruin porn as Dan Rule termed it recently.

Thankfully, these latest photographs are of a different taxonomic order – they are vital, alive, full of swirling tarantism that beautifully expresses the trapped energy that Ferran saw in a 1940s photographic archive of 38 unidentified women who were patients of a Sydney psychiatric hospital. In their formalist abstraction the artist has perfectly captured the unquiet spirit of the women and – here is the crux of the matter for me – these photographs allow me to go further into the subject, they take me to a different place and don’t just leave me on the surface of the image/history. They speak to me, they n/trance in multiple ways like little of Ferran’s work has done before for I feel this work, this hidden narrative, in the artist’s performative shaping of reality. Suddenly these women, trapped in a space (of the photograph, of the archive) and place (of the hospital), can spread their wings and anonymously shake their feathers (their spirit) with declamatory enthusiasm. As an artist friend of mine Julie Clarke observed, “I was captured by the amount of folds in the fabric Ferran has used. Her emphasis on ‘felt’ as felt emotion and the feeling associated with those almost absent bodies is intriguing.” And how that felt emotion relates to the work of Joseph Beuys and his use of felt as insulation, warmth and a kind of comfort, here represented in institutional form (I am reminded by the markings on the felt of the arrows of prison garments).

As the text for the exhibition states, “This new series marks a significant shift in approach, as Ferran harnesses photography and performance in an endeavour to manifest the archive’s continuing power in the present. Ferran’s performers conceal their identities behind lengths and swathes of painted felt, in some cases creating strange and outlandish figures in a disorder of material, bodies and space.”

It is a welcome shift in approach. Ferran’s mental, material dis/order produces significantly more memorable images than what has “passed” before, imaging as they do a conflation of past, present and future rather than relying on the death of the historical archive evidenced in the deathly photograph.

Dr Marcus Bunyan for the Art Blart blog

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Many thankx to Stills Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

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Anne Ferran
Agitated thrush
2013
from Box of Birds series
Pigment print
72 x 48 cm
Editions of 5 + 2AP

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Anne Ferran
Clamorous shrike
2013
from Box of Birds series
Pigment print
72 x 48 cm
Editions of 5 + 2AP

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Anne Ferran
Conspicuous kite
2013
from Box of Birds series
Pigment print
72 x 48 cm
Editions of 5 + 2AP

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Anne Ferran
Night whistler
2013
from Box of Birds series
Pigment print
72 x 48 cm
Editions of 5 + 2AP

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Box of Birds

In her new body of photographs, Box of Birds, Ferran reflects again on a photographic archive she first engaged with a decade ago. In 2003 the artist worked with a small archive depicting 38 female psychiatric patients from a hospital in Sydney in the late 1940s. Moving from direct contact with the original source material, she has reiterated and expanded upon her engagement with this small, melancholy history.

In 1-38 (2003) Ferran carefully cropped each of the images to retain the subject’s anonymity whilst calling attention to small details and particularities such as hand position, the stretch of cloth across a torso, or the position of a button on a jacket. 1-38 did something quite complex – deeply respectful, it protected the individual’s subjectivity by keeping the face from our view; this absenting also alluded to the effects of institutionalisation on the individual and photography’s implication in it. INSULA (2003), a parallel work deriving from the same archive, addressed the face itself, collating cropped images of the women’s faces in an artist’s book. In the exhibition, the intimate encounter with these recognisable portraits was mediated by an invigilated space and a gradual revelation enabled by the artist’s precisely folded pages.

The new photographs are performative; we see female subjects (distinguishable by their feet and hands, the only visible parts of their body) in active relationship with a number of large felt cloths. They document two performance modes that we might describe as ‘presentation’ and ‘improvisation’. The presentations are structured in a large grid, the improvisations as singular, more isolated experiences. The felt is dyed blue, taupe, grey or brown, with white bands cutting geometric segments across their width and length. Their dimensions are reminiscent of the body – they resemble a blanket, a tunic, a smock. The white bands follow the seams and the felt recalls the matted cloth of the clothes worn by the women in the original photographic archive. As it does in the work of Joseph Beuys, the felt suggests insulation, warmth and a kind of comfort. In its relationship to the archive, however, it also suggests a certain institutional resignation, a standard-issue mournfulness.

How do these performances function? What is revealed, and concealed, by the collaborations Ferran’s subjects enact with these cloths? There is, I think, a doing and undoing being performed here – a kind of strange, formal ceremony followed by a release.

In the major grid series of 38 images, the felt is being held in front of Ferran’s subjects. In response to a direction by the artist, 38 individual cloths are ‘presented’ to the camera, as the subjects simultaneously ‘hide’ behind them. It’s a little like a roll-call; the seriality of the cloths opens up to reveal particularities in similar ways to Ferran’s 2003 project. Geometries, folds, shadow, light and colour allocate difference within this delicate typology. Ferran has said that these photographs remind her of Walker Evans’ images of African masks taken in 1935. This builds a complex association, one of categorisation, colonisation and fetishisation. Most strongly, though, it figures the cloths themselves as a kind of mask, signs of human subjectivity that also act to conceal the wearer’s specificity. This association also enacts a shift in scale; the body becomes aligned with the face, shifting between the two registers.

The ‘improvisations’ in Ferran’s suite of photographs are rather more wayward. As such, they resist the drive to categorisation that we might pursue in the grid works. Strangely, the role of the camera feels more predatory in these works. Ferran has sometimes shot from above, or maybe it’s just that the subjects are now engaged with the floor as they are enveloped by, tussle with, and are set in flight by these moving, folding, floating lengths of felt. What Ferran captures here is neither dance nor delirium, yet I am reminded of representations of the frenzied, trance-like dancing mania of tarantism, mythologised as both malady and cure. And of Beuys, again, bundled up in the folds of a large piece of grey felt in a cage shared with a coyote, his walking stick protruding from this uncanny form like a beseeching claw.

Ferran has titled these works with names of birds. They are not the names of existing species, but ones she has conjured up, an exercise in imaginative invention, or perhaps reinvention. Further, growing up in New Zealand, I learnt that to feel like ‘a box of birds’ is to observe in oneself a liveliness, a sense of joie de vivre. But, like many casual turns of phrase, to describe a feeling of wellbeing in this way has always seemed slightly sinister to me, provoking as it does images of entrapment, likely panic, and of freedom curtailed. Ferran’s engagement is drawn more from Plato, who likened the mind to a cage of birds; in confusion our thoughts flutter from our grasp. Language and its meaning, like photography, is always slippery, a truth Ferran has always been alert to. Box of Birds is enlivened and activated by this knowledge, as well as her persistent engagement with the past, imagined in the present.

Kyla McFarlane

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Anne Ferran
Pale-headed flycatcher
2013
from Box of Birds series
Pigment print
72 x 48 cm
Editions of 5 + 2AP

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Anne Ferran
Slender-throated warbler
2013
from Box of Birds series
Pigment print
72 x 48 cm
Editions of 5 + 2AP

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Anne Ferran
Stonebird
2013
from Box of Birds series
Pigment print
72 x 48 cm
Editions of 5 + 2AP

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Anne Ferran
Tricoloured sylph
2013
from Box of Birds series
Pigment print
72 x 48 cm
Editions of 5 + 2AP

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Anne Ferran
Feathered Emissary
2013
from Box of Birds series
Pigment print
60 x 80 cm
Editions of 5 + 2AP

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“Over the past 20 years Anne Ferran has worked with the residues of Australia and New Zealand’s colonial histories, probing them for gaps and silences. She has been especially drawn to the lives of anonymous women and children, seeking to shed light on their presence, and absence, in museum collections, photographic archives and historic sites. It is characteristic of Ferran’s images that the subject is not what is seen but rather what haunts it, something only partially visible. Intellectually and emotionally engaging, her photographs have explored episodes of incarceration in prisons, asylums, hospitals and nurseries, giving voice to the spectres of the lost and unseen.

Box of Birds returns to the subject matter of her previous works INSULA and 1-38: 1940s photographs of 38 unidentified women who were patients of a Sydney psychiatric hospital. In a significant shift of approach, rather than exhuming traces of the past, Ferran harnesses photography and performance in an endeavour to manifest its continuing power in the present.

Ferran’s process alternated between the considered and the uncontrollable. Female performers were instructed to hold pieces of felt up to her camera, the 38 lengths of dyed and painted fabric recalling the crumpled clothes worn by the women in the original photographic archive. Other images were wholly improvised, the performers creating strange and outlandish figures out of a disorder of material, bodies and space.

In a deliberate departure from the 1940s archive, Ferran’s performers conceal their identities behind lengths and swathes of fabric, raising ethical questions about photography’s role in recognition, representation and expression.

All the work in Box of Birds aims to elicit the energy Ferran saw trapped in those 1940s photographs, their unquiet spirit.”

Press release from the Stills Gallery website

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Anne Ferran
Chorus No.1
2013
from Box of Birds series
38 Pigment prints
60 x 42 cm each
Editions of 5 + 2AP

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Anne Ferran
Chorus No.2
2013
from Box of Birds series
38 Pigment prints
60 x 42 cm each
Editions of 5 + 2AP

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Anne Ferran
Chorus No.3
2013
from Box of Birds series
38 Pigment prints
60 x 42 cm each
Editions of 5 + 2AP

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Anne Ferran
Chorus No.4
2013
from Box of Birds series
38 Pigment prints
60 x 42 cm each
Editions of 5 + 2AP

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Anne Ferran
Chorus No.5
2013
from Box of Birds series
38 Pigment prints
60 x 42 cm each
Editions of 5 + 2AP

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Stills Gallery
36 Gosbell Street
Paddington NSW 2021
Australia
T: 61 2 9331 7775

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 11.00 am – 6.00 pm

Stills Gallery website

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