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.
