Join Curators Claire Taylor and Elizabeth Day for a floor talk in the gallery to gain further insight into the exhibition Dreams Nursed in Darkness.

Dreams Nursed in Darkness brings together art by people who know incarceration firsthand, alongside artworks that respond to Australia's prison and detention systems, past and present. The exhibition explores life within the criminal justice, mental health and immigration detention systems, and looks at the inequalities that put people at risk of entering these systems or cause them to return.

The curators will talk through how the works in this exhibition challenge us to think about the failures of our prison systems, the unfairness built into our laws, rules, organisations and social systems, and our own roles in these long-standing issues.

Free event, booking essential.

About the Curators

Dr Elizabeth Day was born in Liverpool, UK, and migrated in 1963 with her family to Tasmania, where she was confronted by the harsh colonial history still resonant in that state. She is a practicing contemporary artist who has a long history working in the mental health/carceral system. Her engagement with this silent walled-in world stems from an experience of incarceration within her own family. Her artwork has engaged the subject of the imposition of early colonial rule on the landscape and its Indigenous population and the transgenerational trauma it has produced. Her recent exhibition at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery The Fragility of Goodness: The Prisonon the Landscape and Other Stories demonstrated her performative unraveling of carceral and personal histories.

Claire Taylor is an independent curator living and working on unceded Dharawal Country, who specialises in collaborative projects that extend beyond traditional gallery contexts and approaches. Her early career includes curatorial projects for the Tate, Royal College of Art, and Central Saint Martins, London, where she was a research associate developing the inaugural AFTERALL project with Jérôme Sans (co-founder of the Palais de Tokyo). Since migrating to Australia, she has been a curatorial researcher for two Biennale of Sydney artistic directors and delivered public and community-engaged projects with partnering institutions such as City of Sydney, Wollongong City Council, Sydney Trains, Sydney Metro, Western Sydney Local Health District, and the University of Sydney’s Tin Sheds Gallery. Dreams Nursed in Darkness at Hazelhurst Arts Centre (and previously Wollongong Art Gallery) is her third major curatorial project intersecting with carceral contexts, following a large-scale exhibition on Cockatoo Island and a significant community-arts collaboration with Elizabeth Day across Parramatta North and Parramatta Justice Precinct.

Photographs courtesy Elizabeth Day and Claire Taylor.

Council staff may take photos and or videos at this event. We might use those images in our publications, on website or social media or other communications. Please tell a staff member on the day if you don't want your image used.

Contact the host of Curator talk with Elizabeth Day and Claire Taylor