Box of Birds

Anne Ferran

 

Presented by Global Art Projects in association with Monash Gallery of Art as part of the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival Cultural Program 2014

 

Anne Ferran is one of Australia’s foremost photographic artists. Ferran’s work has for three decades examined Australia’s lost or forgotten histories, especially the stories of women. Her photographs have often investigated the way that clothing and fabric (examples of which are now usually found in museums and archives) are the only remaining witnesses to those lost stories. But as Ferran’s photographs have usually shown, these textile relics can only ever reveal a small part, if anything at all, of their history.

 

This exhibition of three large photographs hanging in the window boxes in the Sofitel Lobby, draws on Ferran’s recent series Box of birds. The photographs depict dancers enacting improvised movements with large pieces of dyed and painted felt. The felt distorts the shape of the dancers’ bodies and cloaks their identity. At the same time, and as is often the case with fabric, the felt – with its thick folds and muted colours – performs or enacts a personality of its own.

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