Terry Ayres

My name's Sue Paul. I was invited to set up an art class in maximum security at Long Bay in 1986. Little did I know that I would actually go on to develop a specialist art program, set up the Boom Gate gallery at Long Bay, and also establish the department's art collection. I didn't realize I'd be there for 25 years.

I'd like to discuss the work of Jeff Webster. Jeff also has two main strands to his work. The early work, in particular, is figurative, where he was documenting the prison itself and the inmates when he first started doing drawings. They're quite realistic. This is probably an example where people, when they're starting out with drawing, want to make it as real as possible. But then over time, the works start to become much more expressive, more emotive, more descriptive, and have a lot more feeling in them.

Again, this is starting to just free up a little bit. Men in the yard, portrait of an inmate. You can see in this how he's just starting to become a little bit more comfortable with the medium, in this case, a charcoal pencil. But certainly, it's more expressive.

This work is a self-portrait. He did quite a series of works showing himself in different states, whether it was anxiety, feeling calm and tranquil, or feeling more depressed. He did some series of drawings of the yard. Again, this one's quite realistic, but it's definitely much more mature than his drawings from a couple of years beforehand. But then he progressively becomes much freer.

Very interesting. Personally, I prefer these freer works. I think they're far more expressive and just have, formally, a lot more to look at in the way that he's using line. This other one in the yard, it's almost furtive in the way that the inmates' body language is captured, the way Jeff's capturing the inmates talking around the table.

This is a large drawing, and it shows how important art can be as a record of important documentation. Because this no longer exists in one of the wings. At one point, they turned the upstairs level into a protection area. So this no longer exists. But you can see that they added razor wire, an extra layer of security, so that the men in the main part of the jail downstairs couldn't get access to people in the protection area. I think he's used a graphite stick. It's very successful formally. You can see there's been a lot of maturity in his drawing over a couple of years.

In the early 90s, I was asked if I'd prepare an art curriculum for the department. So I prepared this publication, Vocational Art Studies, and mentioned that Jeff Webster illustrated a number of the areas of work we were looking at in the syllabus. In this one, we were exploring qualities of line, the way you can use line and different materials that have a big impact on the way you can express or portray something. That was a really interesting and great collaboration with the inmates.

Another dimension to Jeff's work was conceptually dealing with sophisticated material subjects. In this particular work, Innovations of Identification, which is also in the department's collection, at first it looks like maybe it's an abstract or semi-abstract image, and you may wonder what it's all about. But he created this in response to new legislation that was introduced where certain inmates were required to give DNA samples. This became compulsory, and Jeff was very upset and annoyed by this. He thought it was an infringement on his privacy. So he fought against it initially but to no avail. In this work, his response was saying, "OK, have it all, have it your way." You'll notice that there's his barcode used for the weekly buy-up that all the inmates have. It has his MIN number.

Every inmate has their own MIN number. It has his portrait, his photograph from his ID card. It has his date of birth. It's very subtle, but in the background is a large imprint of his fingerprint. And there's the word "eloqui" written in it. Eloqui, the Latin, which means to speak out.

So what he's done with all of those various elements is that he's changed the scale of them and he's changed the density or the tonal difference. Consequently, with tone and size, by varying both of those, he's creating a lot of depth. Certain parts of the composition are going way back and a lot of it is actually coming forward.

So this was an incredibly mature work, both in concept and in the way that he portrayed it. In fact, the Attorney General and the Minister for Justice at the time, John Hatzistergos, wanted this work to be displayed in their boardroom. It subsequently became part of the department's collection.

Yeah, I just think it's an extraordinary piece of work.