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Sun Slave
Easy Listening
Philipa Veitch, Mark Brown, Ryszard Dabek, Alex Gawronski, Camilla Hannan, Nigel Helyer, Lily Hibberd and Bronia Iwanczak, curator Philipa Veitch
Westspace, Melbourne
June-July 2013
Catalogue PDF



Sun Slave, 2013
Installation of video and found objects
8:54 minutes
Dimensions variable
Text excerpts from
'Maria: or The Wrongs of Woman' by Mary Wollstonecraft
published after her death in 1798

Sun slave is a recollection of the future. Inspired from Simone Weil's essay 'Decreation,' on the concept of the role of death in producing life, this work feels its way through the wasteland of our dispossession of the natural world.

Photo below: Matthew Stanton





Above: video still

I lie in a grass circle in the Western Desert, a discarded blanket for a cloak. In desert ecology fire reignites the seeds that lie in wait. I read aloud the story of Maria. Abandoned to madness by her husband, divorced from her child, she is dead to society, a burden, an archetype of uselessness. A landscape of reclaimed rubber is the setting for the video of this short performance. Like Maria the material scene is the substance of excess but which must be used somehow, expended so that production and its surplus might liberate instead of making more refuse. The shadow of a dead star passes across the expiring sun, however fearful, this moment is a state of change and not an ending. The woman, the fire and the eclipse have this in common: a future born of loss and destruction.

Above photo: Matthew Stanton