Artist Biography

Prominent Australian artist Anne Ferran, works chiefly in photography and video. Her landmark series Carnal Knowledge (1984) and Scenes on the Death of Nature (1986) have been celebrated, collected and exhibited widely across Australia. Throughout her career, Ferran has repeatedly explored the meagre residues of Australia’s colonial past, paying particular attention to the lives of women and children and their exclusion from recorded history. A critical result of the artist’s research into the histories of incarceration in prisons, asylums, hospitals and infant nurseries, is the powerful and engaging series 1-38 (2003).

In the mid 1990s, Ferran began producing unique 1:1 ratio photograms of garments worn by women and children in early colonial Australia. Disembodied and ethereal, these images endow the discarded garments with an uncanny presence. In recent decades, her practice incorporates elements of performance to affirm the past as an active rather than inert force, as seen in Box of Birds (2013) and Birdlike (2022). Taking on manifold visual forms and playing as they do with the invisibility and anonymity of places and objects, Ferran’s images are typically haunted by things unseen.

Since graduating from the Sydney College of the Arts in 1985, she has exhibited across Australia, North America, Europe and Asia for almost four decades. After receiving a Master of Fine Arts from the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales in 1994, Ferran was Associate Professor of Photomedia at the Sydney College of the Arts for over a decade. In 2014, a landmark survey exhibition Shadow Land (accompanied by an in-depth exhibition publication) toured venues across Australia: Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery in Perth; Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney; Newcastle Art Gallery in Newcastle, NSW and the Western Plains Cultural Centre in Dubbo, NSW.

Ferran has participated in significant curated and touring exhibitions including Know My Name at the National Gallery of Australia (2020), Uncommon World: Aspects of Contemporary Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia (2000); Photography & Place: Australian landscape photography, 1970s until now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2011) and the inaugural Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia (1990).

The artist has completed numerous international residencies throughout her career, including the Australia Council Studio Residencies in Barcelona (1997), London (2005), Helsinki (2015), in addition to the Cité Internationale des Arts residency in Paris (1987, 2015). She was the inaugural Artist in Residence at the National Museum of Australia (2002) and was a Bundanon Artist in Residence in Nowra, NSW (2015, 2018).

Examples of Ferran’s work can be found in major public and private  collections across Australia in additional to important institutional collections worldwide. These include the National Gallery of Australia; National Museum of Australia; National Gallery of Victoria; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Art Gallery of Western Australia; International Museum of Photography and Film, New York; Queensland Art Gallery; Parliament House, Canberra; University of Melbourne, among others.