Uv'la Marina

The installation work U’vla marina occupied four upstairs rooms of Elizabeth Bay House, Sydney, a colonial mansion originally built to house naturalist Alexander Macleay and his family. The work was an exploration in material form of the significance of beds and bedding. In the nineteenth century the bed was an important status symbol, with its degree of comfort directly corresponding to one’s wealth and class. Bedding, with its multiple discrete layers, can serve as a metaphor for the imported class system of colonial society.

I replaced the  straw, horse hair and goose feather mattress In the master bedroom with a high mound of oyster shells;  the horse hair mattress in the daughter’s bedroom with dried seaweed and cuttlefish; and the straw mattress in the  maid’s bedroom with dried husks of corn. In the fourth room I exhibited two photogram cyanotypes of the large windows that look towards the heads of Sydney Harbour and the world beyond.

U’vla marina was exhibited with works by Susan Andrews and Jayne Dyer in Spare Room at Elizabeth Bay House, Sydney in 2007.