Rebekah Farr Rogue & Vagabond Exhibition

Carterton artist Rebekah Farr’s fourth solo exhibition, Rogue and Vagabond feature portraits of New Zealand women prisoners of the early 1900s.

Rebekah found her subjects in prison release mugshots on the National Library’s online Papers Past. The photos are strangely emotional but because of the need to stay still for so long due to the primitive camera technology, you can catch only a glimmer of what the subject may be feeling. Many of the women she painted were repeat offenders, trapped in a cycle of prisons and reformatories. They are women whose lives have been hidden from family histories, their stories cleaned up, their real lives and hardships buried.

As with her past exhibitions, Rebekah uses cold wax. This show allows the viewer to enter the creative process. We see parts of objects all the time and we use our imaginations to fill in the bits we can’t see. As parts of the women’s faces become blurred or obliterated the viewers are encouraged to see them in their own minds.