A Haunting, Castlereagh Highway, Armatree, New South Wales, 2021-24

A small dark farmhouse with an eerie red glow.

A Haunting is an art installation to be visited alone at night.

Situated north of Gilgandra on the Castlereagh Highway just before the Armatree Rd turnoff, Armatree NSW Australia

The house is to be viewed from a near distance, from the property fence beside the highway.

No visitors to venture inside the yard or the driveway of the house or into the front door, which bleeds red light.

There is nothing to see inside the house anyway – just a red void

The installation is cold silent but the night is sometimes punctuated with the sound of crickets, screeching galah birds and passing pick-up trucks.

Date of installation late 2021 – to late 2023. Or for infinity.

Concept: A Haunting wants to play with our night time-attuned receptors, when our ears check the sound of a twig snapping.

When our eyes register dark shapes that seem to cross our periphery.

A Haunting can read like a real-life nightmare that gleams from windows out into the darkness of Australia’s great and vast interior.

The 1920s-built house sits on confiscated lands of the Wailwan peoples and other nearby language groups and radiates as if like a dark bloody history that speaks of Colonial settlement and of Indigenous skirmishes with pastoralists.

But passing folk might initially view A Haunting in other ways

The lights can read as frenetic like in an emergency as if coming from an Ambulance or a Police light. Like as if some forensic crime photographers are at work inside the house – processing the aftermath of a crime. The house sits like an agitated photo darkroom.

Or even a lonesome bordello completely empty with no customers.

Internationally acclaimed Australian artist Tracey Moffatt has created a new site-specific art installation entitled A Haunting which is an abandoned farm house that pulses red light.

As of May 2024 this installation at Armatree NSW has finished.