Tracing Proximity

Created for the 2021/22 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship finalist exhibition held at the National Art School Gallery, Tracing Proximity responds to the old Darlinghurst Gaol, the site where the National Art School now stands. The 31-metre looped scroll and sound installation recalls the rhythms of women’s labour and the intimacy of their bodies confined within the sandstone walls. An intensive stitching process incorporating thread with Chinese ink on paper, articulates daily cycles of incarceration and forced work through varied shades of ink. 

Making this work gave Chen time to reflect on the histories of her grandmothers and great-grandmother: their deprivation of bodily agency and reproductive health rights, tenacious resistance of coercive control and violence; and their capacity to endure. The artist’s mother contributed to the labour of making the 31-metre circular scroll, whose length commemorates the number of births and deaths of children within the Darlinghurst Gaol, a place where much later, both she and her daughter would study.

Cindy Yuen-Zhe Chen, Tracing Proximity, 2022, sound feedback composition, 8 minutes 54 seconds. Ideally experienced with headphones.