Captivating Yarn: Elizabeth Day’s Parramatta Female Factory Wall (2024)
Elizabeth Day resurrects Parramatta Female Factory’s vanished solitary wing at Wollongong Art Gallery, knotting trauma, carceral memory, and the unfinished business of colonial reckoning.
Parramatta Female Factory Wall (2024)—henceforth Wall—is an artwork installation commissioned for “Dreams Nursed in Darkness,” and curated by artist Elizabeth Day and independent curator Claire Taylor, centred on carceral themes at the Wollongong Art Gallery in late 2024. Day re-created a sandstone wall of the Parramatta Female Factory which bears the material mark, or trace, of the solitary confinement wing that has long since been demolished. This prison yard wall is replete with the trauma of its female convict inhabitants, and the male convicts who built it.
Exclusive to the Magazine
Captivating Yarn: Elizabeth Day’s Parramatta Female Factory Wall (2024) by David Macarthur is featured in full in Issue 3 of Memo magazine.
Get your hands on the print edition through our online shop or save up to 20% and get free domestic shipping with a subscription.
Related
Claire Bishop critiques “research art” as text-heavy and citation-driven, but her Eurocentric framing misses artists like D Harding and Megan Cope, whose work transforms research into lived cultural practice.
Dean Kissick’s Downward Spiral chronicled the art world’s contradictions with the breathless urgency of an end-times prophet. Now, with the column closed and the critic in semi-exile, the question lingers: was he a voice of his generation, or just another scenester burning out on his own myth?
The Tennant Creek Brio’s art isn’t a legible script, a tidy lineage, or an easy metaphor—it’s a rupture, a refusal, a site of resurgence. This story sends us somewhere else, reaching for something that came before or after, looking for what’s out back, round the back of the house, the shed, the art centre, the “outback.”
