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Anne Ferran's latest body of work Lost to Worlds is a series of photographs, colour photocopies, videos and a booklet investigating the sites of two former factories in Tasmania which were used to incarcerate women convicts and their children in the nineteenth century. Ferran had photographed these sites as they remain today and printed them in large black and white format. One site, the Ross Female Factory, is now an open sheep paddock. Ferran has turned her lens toward the ground and photographed the gentle contours of the grassed landscape which blankets the rubbled past beneath. The other site is the Cascades Factory in South Hobart. All that remains here is an empty walled brick yard which is today surrounded by concrete roads giving it the appearance of an abandoned construction site.
Ferran's photographs reveal the way in which these landscapes are shaped from fragments of a convict past - one which is largely lost to the gendered chronicles of official Australian history. In her artist's statement, Ferran comments on 'how very little of either places there was left to see'. Yet it is from this absence of coherent structure, of a 'tangible' history, that Ferran creates a forceful evocation of the traces of these institutions and, in doing so, questions the process of historical enquiry to consider how we are to create records of an invisible past.
Lost to worlds follows on from the previous series Securing the Shadow (1995 with Anne Brennan) and Longer than Life (1999) that explored the ‘forgotten’ histories of women who were institutionalised at what are now heritage sites. While these earlier series drew from the personal artefacts of inmates, Lost to Worlds explores