CONTROL. ABUSE. KILL. She’ll Be Right, Mate!. is the result of years of experience, thought and art-making about women. The exhibition honours the women who were murdered in Australia in 2013. Using data from Counting Dead Women (an awareness campaign which researches, records and publishes every reported femicide in Australia), the artist invites the viewer to confront what cannot be said and brings light to heal the wounds around what has been kept secret.
Hayes uses two powerful symbols to signify women and men, and to speak about where this violence frequently occurs. She takes the home as a symbol of women’s safety and daily life and highlights it as a site of ongoing and accumulative violence. The blue singlet, casually called “the wife basher” in Australian vernacular, is a poignant and brutal motif, with the child’s singlet pointing to when this behaviour is sometimes learned, starting a continuous cycle of violence.
The information in the vinyl panel Remembering Our Sisters, 79 houses constructed from paper, was sourced from the Counting Dead Women campaign. Each house is a small memorial to the women who lost their lives.
WARNING: If this exhibition raises concern for you please reach out and speak to someone. Consider contacting 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732), MensLine Australia (1300 789 978) or Lifeline (13 11 14).
