Dea(r)th
Anne Brennan

1995
mixed media
17.5 x 17.6 cm closed

Handmade bound book comprising laser-printed cover sheets and images produced in Adobe Photoshop, hand-stitched and loose bound in taupe coloured covers.

Significance statement
The installation Secure the shadow was the first investigation by contemporary visual artists of the female inmates of the 19th-century Hyde Park Barracks Asylum and Immigrants Depot. Artists Anne Brennan and Anne Ferran sifted through official records and surviving archaeological fragments to produce photographic works and a collection of handmade books which offered an alternative story of silence and loss.

Brennan was driven by an investigation of the printed and written texts associated with the administration of the asylum and how these could illuminate the women’s obscurity. She described her books as ‘a layering of primary sources and fragments of my own voice’. Joan Kerr observed in her speech at the exhibition opening how Brennan ‘transforms the bleak official language into gently celebratory art books, while never denying the silences and emptiness of the original records’. Brennan and Ferran wrote:

‘The official records consist of tantalisingly brief entries in the “Register of Inmates, Government Asylum for the Infirm and Destitute”. Dates of admissions, releases and deaths, scant life histories. We read of Jane Chester, described by the matron as “a good woman, but an incorrigible drunkard” … The tone is detached, impersonal … What we have arrived at is a kind of imaginative connection, gradually and partially achieved … over time something of them has grown on us.’

History
Anne Brennan made this book for the Secure the shadow exhibition at Hyde Park Barracks from 26 August to 8 October 1995. The installation received Australia Council support and was the outcome of the Historic Houses Trust’s (HHT) first artists in residence scheme at the Barracks. The HHT acquired six Brennan works and 19 works from the exhibition.

Maker biography
Anne Brennan was born in Australia in 1951 and originally trained as a jeweller. As an artist and writer, she lectures in the art theory workshop of the Canberra School of Art at the Australian National University. Brennan has exhibited throughout Australia and has published widely on the visual arts and craft.

Museum number
HHT2002/1-8

Image credit
Jenni Carter

Bibliography  
Brennan, Anne & Ferran, Anne, Secure the shadow [exhibition catalogue], Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, Sydney, 1995
Brennan, Anne & Ferran, Anne, ‘Secure the shadow’, Photofile, No 45, 1995, pp32–36
Kelso, Jane, ‘Secure the shadow: Anne Brennan and Anne Ferran’, Public History Review, Vol 4, 1995, p149
Petersen, John, Hyde Park Barracks Museum: guidebook, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, Glebe, 2003