Anne Ferran is a Sydney-based artist and academic largely concerned with using photography to reclaim forgotten pasts, with a specific interest in the histories of women and children in colonial Australia. Her series Lost to worlds and Lost to worlds 2 depict spaces of women's labour and incarceration where there is nearly nothing left to see, focussing in particular on two Tasmanian convict sites – at Ross in central Tasmania and at South Hobart. This work is from Lost to worlds 2, and responds specifically to the site at Ross, which formerly held a female factory and prison; a place of secondary punishment for women who re­offended after arriving in the colony. Today all that remains of the building is an uneven grassy paddock used for grazing. Ferran visited this site over several years, producing landscapes that capture partial views of the site and suggest traces of its history.

To create these works, Ferran scanned her black-and-white photographs and had them printed as colour images on large aluminium sheets. During the printing process, the artist thus introduced subtle hints of colour to the works so that they sit uneasily between black and white and colour, suggesting a confusion of past and present. This effect is emphasised again as the viewer's body moves past the photographs, creating shadows and rendering details of the images, as with the histories of the women who worked and resided in the former buildings, difficult to see.

(2023)