The Cascades Female Factory
Anna Weston, Unsettled Landscape (2026), solvent transfer, watercolour paper on repurposed scroll 75 × 188cm. Install photo at Metro Arts, photo courtesy of Katie Bennett
Cascades Female Factory - UNESCO Australian Convict site, Nipaula/Hobart, Lutruwita/Tasmania.
Anna Weston, Unsettled Landscape (2026), solvent transfer, watercolour paper on repurposed scroll 75 × 188cm. Finalist in the Churchie Emerging Artist Prize, 2026
Anna Weston, Female Fact-Tree (2026), solvent transfer, graphite on archival rice paper, 45 × 230cm. Install image at the Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs, NT courtesy of Luke Scholes.
Anna Weston, Female Fact-Tree (2026), solvent transfer, graphite on archival rice paper, 45 × 230cm. Finalist in the Alice Prize, 2026.
Anna Weston, Mixed Media & Emotions (2026), solvent transfer, water colour pencil, graphite, black tea, green tea, chalk and orange thread on repurposed cotton sheet (in a repurposed frame), 35.5 x 140cm
Anna Weston, Spill the Tea (2026), solvent transfers, watercolour pencil, graphite, black tea, green tea, tumeric, leaves, cotton thread, repurposed glass beads and gold ribbon; on repurposed cotton sheet. 30 × 40cm
FULL STATEMENT: Unsettled Landscape is part of a deeply personal body of work that centres on women and girls connected to the Cascades Female Factory in Hobart, Tasmania (1828–1856), including women within Weston’s own maternal family line. The work engages with experiences of displacement, forced migration, incarceration, loss, and infant mortality that extended beyond the institution’s walls and across generations. Weston examines how histories of social division and inequality continue to shape understandings of identity, belonging, and Australian cultural memory. The work considers how difficult histories are often silenced or displaced within families and society yet continue to influence the present. By bringing personal ancestry into dialogue with broader colonial histories, Unsettled Landscape reflects on the enduring presence of unresolved legacies that continue to inform present-day social and cultural experience. At the same time, it recognises acts of compassion, resilience, and creative capacities that were often constrained or left unrealised.
Rather than presenting a singular historical account, the work embraces ambiguity and fragmentation. Some histories remain incomplete, resistant to recovery, or accessible only through archival traces and embodied memory. The imagery is drawn almost exclusively from family archives and self-generated photographs spanning the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Family members, sites, symbols, and contemporary landscapes are brought into dialogue, reinforcing the interconnected relationships between place, memory, and lineage. Weston’s process is materially driven and experimental, incorporating repurposed surfaces, solvent-based image transfers, staining, and drawing. Central to this approach is a considered collage composition, where layered materials and imagery are brought into deliberate relation. Through layering, concealment, and revelation, photographs become unstable carriers of memory. Some faces emerge with striking clarity while others dissolve into the surface, as if preferring to stay hidden by time.