'Her Majesty's Prison,' a site-specific installation, by The Tennant Creek Brio and Tina Douglas
Old Beechworth Gaol, Beechworth
7-9 March 2026
Her Majesty's Prison (To remove the armour and expose the skin beneath). A collaboration between Tennant Creek Brio Artists Fabian Brown, Lindsay Nelson, Rupert Betheras, Joseph Williams, Gary Sullibane, Lévi McLean, Eleanor Dixon and collaborators Tina Douglas and Peter Webster.
The selection panel included:
Blair French, CEO Murray Art Museum Albury Caroline Esbenshade, Curator Shepparton Art Museum
Nina Machielse Hunt, Creative Director Beechworth Biennale
Her Majesty’s Prison
(To remove the armour and expose the skin beneath).
“Machines were mice and men were lions once upon a time. But now that it’s the opposite, it’s twice upon
a time.” – Moondog
Her Majesty’s Prison Beechworth hosts sketched portraits that mark a new cultural circuitry. A film
depicts the flow of molten precious metal and the sulfuric emission of industrialised lava-flow. Alloyed
into a solfeggio of unpolished chrome, the phase-locking of mineral frequencies belonging to disparate
metals are tuned to the spectrum of pure gold: 316 Hz. A symbol for timelessness. Time, keeping
company within a disturbed material and psychological state, Her Majesty’s Prison contains its own
counterpoint.
This exhibition disturbs the complacent experience of time by reorienting history into a synergy of absurd conjunctions and composites of language. ‘Installation’ becomes a simulation for the purpose of the public’s sensory surrender to art in a time of technological reversal; art drawn from the morphic field of de-constructed memory, promoting its own and future systems.
In the turbulence of repurposing and recontextualisation, prescribed identity and standard technological
models form into clusters of new material, a resonant mass; a tableaux of absences, a column of ciphers,
an historical jail—a tunnel of silence and site of profanation; an open-loop system in a passage of parallel
time. As a bootleg system of transmutation, transmission, and collectivity, these works mirror and distort the industrial and social worlds that give rise to them.
share into conflict,, to remove the armour and expose the skin beneath. b
