The Pink Palace: From Isolation, 2021
Image credit: Cassie Sullivan 2021
The Pink Palace: From Isolation
CONSTANCE ARI presents The Pink Palace: From Isolation; a selection of works by nipaluna/Hobart-based artists in collaboration with Risdon Prison Inmates, curated by Tess Campbell and Maria Blackwell.
Group Show, Schmørgåsbaag, Nipaluna/Hobart, lutruwita/Tasmania
see you next week, 2021. Sound piece.
Holding the tension between overwhelm and isolation.
Using ambient audio recorded throughout the prison environment, this sound piece has been layered and built to explore the pressure that the prison system can play on overwhelming the senses. It is an attempt to convey the feeling of being introduced to the prison for the first time and the flood of oversaturation and anxiety that experience can induce.
we are all complicit here, 2021. Installation, net, string.
How do our paths look meeting right here? The weight of them? The colour? How heavily indented? How abrasive? How complex? Did they cross each other over before? Will they again? What lasting impact do these brief encounters have?
Each piece of orange thread represents an inmate of the prison (672) stuck in isolation; physically, mentally and/or from particular life experiences such as intergenerational trauma and lack of resources. We move freely through the installation, representing our experience as artists within this project and our brief and intimate connections with the inmates that we leave behind each week. There is a fragile beauty in our paths crossing and separating.
I imagine the way the same generational threads are weaved into the prison system over and over, embedding stories there, encasing entire families. There is a complex layering of gratefulness at being able to experience this project, interacting with these inmates and the guilt that I carry for being able to leave. We are all complicit here.
Today, and over the duration of this project, we are meeting across lutruwita land, waterways and seas.
We acknowledge, with deep respect our traditional owners of these lands, the muwinina people.
We acknowledge that it is a privilege to stand on such special Country and walk in the footsteps of those before us. We recognise the deep hurt that has been caused by the violent merging of where we all now call home and we honour our place here with a responsibility to do better.
We pay our respects to elders past and present and the many Aboriginal people that did not make elder status and to the trouwana palawa community that continue to care for Country today.
