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Still As, 2006

Bluestone gravel
11.5m x 9.5 m approx
Kelly's Garden, Salamanca Place, Hobart
Tasmanian Living Writers' Week, 2006

In the 1950s, a prisoner escaped from Campbell Street Gaol and hid in Kelly's Garden for a number of days before being discovered. At the time, the garden would have been filled with batons of hessian cloth, hung out to dry, and delivery trucks carrying fruit would have driven up and down the laneway, doing three–point turns in the entrance. Imagine hiding amongst the hessian, body pressed against the stone walls, the need to be still when the rest of the world is active – the audacity of it – the madness of it – so desperate to be free yet driven to hiding within a stone courtyard. STILL AS has stemmed from this small but sad story of an unknown escapee taking refuge in a stone enclosure. It is about the imagined experience of having to become so still that one becomes stone – STILL AS, COLD AS, DEAD AS, BLIND AS, DEAF AS stone.