Just outside the walls of Sydney’s gothically looming Long Bay Correctional Complex, 107 artworks from eight different countries are on display at the Boom Gate Gallery. Many are for sale, but not the toilet-paper sculptures by a Queensland prisoner, Ashley, as it is illegal for prisoners in that state to profit from their artwork while in jail or on parole. Curator Damien Linnane had to apply for written permission just to display the work in this show, the Paper Chained International exhibition of inmate art.
Although most of the contributors are named in the exhibition catalogue, Corrective Services NSW has asked that only their first names be used in press coverage. There is a suppression order over the offence of another artist featured, a former Archibald Prize entrant who is indefinitely detained in the Northern Territory.
Much of the work in the exhibition came to Linnane through his position as editor of Paper Chained, a magazine created by and for prisoners and their families in Australia and, increasingly, all over the world.
“It’s difficult to send art out,” says Linnane, “because in prison you only have normal-sized envelopes. For years, this guy in New Zealand had been sending us A4 drawings, folded over three times. I wrote to him and asked if there was any chance that he could send us something bigger, and he had to put in a request form to get a postage tube, and sent it out.”
Even if a prisoner does manage to send his art out, “the prison will never let that painting back in”, says Linnane. “It would be too easy to smuggle something in with the painting, like LSD on the corner. So a couple of the artists have asked me to forward artworks on to their families, if they don’t sell. But some just donated them.”
Linnane is an artist and writer – his latest book, the memoir Raw, was published last year – and a PhD candidate at the University of Newcastle. He served 10 months in six New South Wales jails in 2016, after he burned down the home of a man he believed to have sexually assaulted his girlfriend.
Without Long Bay, he says, he would not exist, as his burglar father met his welfare-worker mother in the jail in 1984.
Linnane, who wears a magenta mohawk and a faintly puzzled smile, says he wanted to make the most out of his time in jail. He had hoped to begin postgraduate studies behind bars but was told he could not have use of a computer.
“So I put in a request to have a textbook posted in,” he says, “so that I could study informally. That was denied. They were, like, ‘If you get a book posted in, then everyone will want a book posted in.’
“A friend of mine in my block put in a request for a giant piece of cardboard to make an artwork, and it was denied for the same reason. They said, ‘If you want a piece of cardboard, that’ll encourage other people to want things as well.’ ”
The only education he could easily access in jail was basic literacy training or a statement of attainment in welding. “And the waitlist for the welding was longer than my sentence,” he says.
“I was depressed and there wasn’t treatment available for that, so the way I managed my depression was to keep myself occupied.” Linnane said he spent the first five months writing a book – his novel, Scarred, was eventually published in 2019 – “and then Istarted teaching myself to draw”.
“Every prison had a couple of dedicated artists. In Glen Innes Correctional Centre, where I did most of my sentence, I was one of two guys who was making artwork for other people. And I went to Mid North Coast Correctional Centre for a medical and appointment and, while I was there, I met a guy who earned money by doing paintings and selling them to other prisoners or exchanging them for food.”
Years later, in the early stages of his doctoral research, he says, “I started thinking about how much art I’ve passively received over the last few years. I’ve got art from all over Australia, New Zealand and the United States, and some of it just came completely unexpectedly. There are 12 A4 paintings from a guy in California in the exhibition, and they just turned up one day in the mail.
“It’s sometimes difficult to get paper in prison,” says Linnane, “which I found out the hard way when I was writing my novel by hand. I was constantly trying to get more paper and, when I ran out, I wrote on the back of inmate request forms. And he’d done the paintings on the back of prison admin forms, because that’s what he had access to.”
A former prisoner in Kenya suggested to Linnane the idea of an international exhibition of inmate art and Linnane brought the idea to Boom Gate Gallery, which displays and sells artwork made exclusively by prisoners in Long Bay and other NSW jails.
The subsequent exhibition is eclectic and challenging, with works ranging from affectingly naive scenes of prison life to abstract paintings including, rather oddly, an impression of Sydney Harbour by a prisoner in Wales. Embroideries by women prisoners in Mexico are particularly striking and not entirely dissimilar to some of the work on show at the Sydney Biennale.
Boom Gate Gallery usually shows a lot of First Nations art. Gallery manager Damian Moss estimates paintings by First Nations artists account for 50-75 per cent of the gallery’s sales.
“I think that reflects the large Indigenous population in the jails,” says Moss, “but also that more Indigenous men in jail paint compared to non-Indigenous. They are shown how to do it by others, and they enjoy doing it and people like to buy Indigenous work.”
Perhaps the most accomplished and dramatic work in the Paper Chained show is Brown black blue on red, a disturbing self-portrait by Arrernte man Malcolm, the artist in indefinite detention whose offence is subject to a suppression order.
While Native American and Māori painters have pictures in the catalogue, there are no other First Nations works. Linnane, who identifies his father’s heritage as Chaori (part-Chinese, part-Māori), says few Australian Indigenous artists replied to his callout.
He did receive one problematic submission – a dot painting from a non-Indigenous inmate, who had learnt from an Indigenous mentor.
“If somebody teaches you art in prison, it’s almost certainly going to be another prisoner,” says Linnane. “And if that prisoner is Indigenous, then they might teach you their Indigenous style.”
Understandably, he says, Boom Gate has a policy of not displaying Indigenous-style artwork from non-Indigenous Australians.
“There’s a lot of creativity inside, but there weren’t a lot of programs for teaching art,” Linnane says. “I taught myself photorealism by copying photos from magazines.
“Every day I would draw and then I would feel good about myself, because I started to see I was developing this talent. It was a way to escape from the monotony and depression of prison.”
Paper Chained International runs until Friday, May 31.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper onMay 18, 2024 as "Artistic freedom".
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