In the Process of Healing

In the Process of Healing is a two-part immersive, site-specific installation developed for the 2017 Ballarat International Foto Biennale and presented within the contemplative surrounds of the former Sacred Heart Convent in Ballarat — a place steeped in institutional history. The project was created with the support of Ballarat Regional Multicultural Council and Ballarat International Foto Biennale festival that year.

This work engages with themes of trauma, resilience, and the potential for collective healing by activating the convent space through sound, photography, and sculptural intervention. Working within the site, I sought to examine both personal and communal experiences of displacement, survival, and memory.

The first installation centres on the lived experience of a Tamil asylum seeker family, captured through intimate photographic portraits and field recordings. Their story unfolds quietly through layers of image and ambient sound, evoking the tension between visibility and erasure, between personal narrative and political circumstance. The space holds their presence with tenderness and respect, foregrounding their dignity and strength within a broader discourse of forced migration and belonging.

The second installation, by contrast, addresses the traumatic legacy of clergy sexual abuse in Ballarat and beyond — a crisis that continues to reverberate through the community. At its core is Chair of Nails, a sculptural work forged from reclaimed timber and hundreds of metal nails, each one a visceral marker of pain and survival. This is accompanied by a soundscape composed from layered, reverberating tones — both unsettling and meditative — which further anchors the installation in an emotional landscape of grief, silence, and resolve. This space acts as an offering: a memorial, a site of witness, and a call to listen.

Both installations invite audiences into a slow, sensory engagement, asking not for passive observation but for active reflection. In the Process of Healing disrupts conventional documentary modes by collapsing the boundaries between the intimate and the public, the visible and the suppressed. It draws from a practice deeply concerned with social justice, memory work, and the transformative capacity of art to speak where words fall short.

This project continues to inform my interest in site-responsive practice and the ethics of representation — particularly how photography and sound can hold space for those whose stories are too often unheard.

★ Runner up, best exhibition Ballarat Intl Foto Biennale 2017

“Very theatrical, stimulating. When you go to the room, the ‘Chair of nails’ is very stark, but very evocative too. Most theatrically exciting thing for me was coming out of this room and having to walk through the photographs again, and see them in a different emotional state of mind. Beautifully theatrically presented.”