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In the catalogue for the exhibition, Australian Photography: The 1980s (National Gallery of Australia, 1988), Anne Ferran's entry follows Bill Henson's. Because they emerged from very different ideological spaces, at a time when such things still mattered, I did not tend to connect them. But, in retrospect, albeit at the cost of finer discriminations, I can now locate some common concerns. Ferran and Henson shared a theatrical bent, with a fondness for staging large-scale dramatic tableaux; they also shared a not altogether politically correct propensity to prey on the adolescent body; and a somewhat unhealthy and unsettling obsession with death and decay, illness and loss.
Of course, their differences are more striking. Henson clearly perceives himself as a romantic existential artist, brooding and moody, with a melancholic, dark personal vision. Ferran is a much more complex artist, more distanced from her imaginary demons, as interested in the pursuit of archaeological and genealogical knowledges as in the staging of romantic melancholic scenes. Unlike Henson, she is interested in histories - of art, of photography, of people and places. And while Henson endlessly reproduces, with little variation, his large dark brooding landscapes inhabited by anonymous naked adolescents, Ferran has moved on from photographs to photograms; from staged tableaux of draped female figures à la grecque to staged images of drapery alone; from the history of the representation of women to the history of colonial New South Wales.
While fossicking about in the drawers and crannies of old colonial mansions, as artist in residence for the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, Ferran unearthed scraps and items of clothing. In her recent exhibitions she has used this clothing as subject. The drapery