The Lost Objects

Background: The work draws on Susan Best’s (2016) Reparative Aesthetics, Jill Bennett’s (2005) work on art, affect and trauma, and Ann Cvetkovich’s (2003) work on ‘felt archives’ to explore the various ways traumatic histories linger in the everyday. It draws on the knowledge produced by the care leaver community in Australia through a series of long-term collaborations with care leavers and advocacy organisations. Contribution: The Lost Objects was produced in collaboration with the Orphanage Museum (Geelong, previously Bankstown), Care Leavers Australasia Network (CLAN), and individual care leavers in Australia. The work contributes to an expanded archive of visual responses and narrative fragments that address the felt experiences often absent from the historical accounts and institutional records. Selected from over two thousand objects, the installation comprises fifteen photographs of objects that have been collected from Australian orphanages or donated by Australian care leavers. The work contributes to justice-led movements aiming to generate evidence of the lived experiences of individuals who spent time in care as children in the 20th century. It contributes to a ‘felt archive’ that records both the affective dimensions of these histories and highlights the quotidian sites of trauma and memory that Best (2017) describes as the temporal liminality between remembering and forgetting. Significance: The work was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ballarat in the exhibition Out of the Darkness: A Survivors Journey. The exhibition is a significant contribution to the cultural silence that has surrounded the history of institutional care in Australia. The exhibition is a collaboration between care leaver, survivor, and artist Robert House and Art Gallery of Ballarat Curator Julie McClean with support from the Continuous Voices reference group. The work has since been acquired in full by The Art Gallery of Ballarat (2021).