Threshold: Z Ward
2026, hand woven tapestry (wool, cotton, linen, metallic thread)
Z Ward once house the ‘criminally insane’ - a building whose entire architectural logic was containment, its occupants sent there because no one wanted them seen. It now operates as a site of public fascination: ghost tours sell out, National Trust open days draw crowds who queue to get in.
This work sits inside this reversal. The structure is mirrored across a still, dark surface until building, cells and reflection become difficult to separate - structure doubling into something closer to memory, or to a haunting. The effect reads as sinister and calm in the same instant, and the piece does not resolve that contradiction. A place built to erase presence has become a place people travel to in order to feel one.
Woven in greyscale wool against black, the work continues an ongoing body of tapestries examining sites of historical institutional confinement in South Australia - where architecture designed to hold people out of public memory is now, often, the very thing the public shows up for.
Threshold: Basement