Soft cap #1

For more than three decades, artist Anne Ferran has explored the absences within Australian history, drawing attention to people whose stories have been overlooked. In the mid-1990s she began to focus on the women and children incarcerated in asylums, hospitals, orphanages and prisons throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Ferran’s series Soft caps was made during an artist residency at Sydney’s Hyde Park Barracks with artist and writer Anne Brennan. As Ferran recalled: ‘We spent months researching the elderly women who were housed there in the late 19th century, when the building served as an Asylum for the Aged, Infirm and Destitute. There wasn’t much of a record to go on – not even their names.’ An estimated 40,000 women passed through the barracks until it was closed in 1886 due to overcrowding.

In Soft caps, Ferran recreated the simple calico caps worn by many of these women. She presents them as they would have been worn, with dark voids where the faces should appear. For Ferran, the caps represent the women’s ‘individuality, their anonymity, the reduced circumstances of their lives and their absence from our collective stories’. The series serves as a haunting reminder of the lived experiences of these women, which are integral in the retelling of Australia’s history.

Gift of the artist 2025. Donated through the Australian Cultural Gifts Program.
© Anne Ferran