ARTIST Cathy Farry will be exhibiting her new work, Survival Kits for Literary Heroines, from May at the Broken Hill City Art Gallery.
Farry said she was inspired after a conversation with a work colleague post-COVID.
“We’d talk about making survival kits, from an artistic point of view, for a future that you can’t imagine kind of thing,” she said.
“So if it were post-apocalyptic but you don’t know why. You’d make a survival kit or a toolbox which would have things in it, but you wouldn’t actually know what those things were.”
Farry said she began thinking about her favourite literary characters and what they might need to save them.
“So I came up with the Jane Eyre one first,” she said.
“For Jane’s I made a little pocket like they wore back in the 1800s. They were a separate garment so they weren’t sewn into your clothes, you wore them underneath.
“If you’ve read the book, she leaves her husband and leaves all her stuff on the carriage. And if she had all her stuff in a pocket, it wouldn’t have been.”
Farry said there are seven survival kits and she’s used a range of art mediums and techniques to make each one.
She said she only picked characters she liked and that she wanted to help.
“I wanted to save them I suppose,” she said.
Another artwork is a handkerchief she’s embroidered with 15 signs that you’re in a toxic relationship.
“So there’s a kind of modern sensibility that I’m applying that the characters wouldn’t have had access to,” she said.
“For Anna Karenina who is very miserable for the whole book pretty much, I’ve done keys and things but also Prozac.”
Farry’s show will open as part of the new round of exhibitions at the gallery next month.
