PINK BLEACHED HARMONY, 2025
Sunbleached manufactured boxes.
IMPRESSIVE WALL
Matte black wall paint & black water based enamel paint, 2025
Captive
Mia Bell 1/03/2025 - 22/03/2025
For the past few weeks, Mia has been laying cardboard boxes flat on a dirty quilt in the backyard.
On the first day, it rained, and the boxes were damaged. After that, I assume she started checking the forecast and made sure to leave them out only when clear and sunny weather was predicted.
Since then, the sun has bleached the boxes a few shades lighter. Mia only bleaches one side of
each foldable box, leaving the other side a plush light pink.
When I met Mia in Year Seven, I felt bonded to her because of our shared pinkish complexion. We were both pale and freckly, permanently flushed red. The boxes Mia uses in her installations sort of look like her. The most reduced parts of her. Black, for her dark, luscious hair, and pink, for he pale pink skin.
When you leave paint in the sun, ultraviolet rays break down its molecular structure, resulting in a loss of colour intensity. Over time, the paint’s appearance becomes dull and chalky due to oxidation. Mia tells me that she makes collapsible sculptures that respond to the spaces they exist in. The boxes—or the molecules that make up the impermanent object—do not magically materialise within the space, however. They are imported from my backyard, after suffering under the scorching sun and withstanding structural breakdown. In the gallery space, I imagine you can hear the quiet, vestigial sizzle of the sun-bleached boxes.
Before my backyard, the boxes lived in Mia’s car boot, a spare storage room at her girlfriend’s
North Melbourne sharehouse, and the Monash Caulfield campus. At the Monash grad show, the
boxes took the shape of a spiral, extending from a Fibonacci sequence traced onto the studio
floor. When Mia had crits or small exhibitions, she would prop the boxes into shape and store
them on trestle tables indoors. They happened to be under direct sunlight, so a few random boxes
changed colour over time. More precisely, their colour faded.When I met Mia in Year Seven, I felt bonded to her because of our shared pinkish complexion. We were both pale and freckly, permanently flushed red. The boxes Mia uses in her installations sort of look like her. The most reduced parts of her. Black, for her dark, luscious hair, and pink, for he pale pink skin.
When you leave paint in the sun, ultraviolet rays break down its molecular structure, resulting in a loss of colour intensity. Over time, the paint’s appearance becomes dull and chalky due to oxidation. Mia tells me that she makes collapsible sculptures that respond to the spaces they exist in. The boxes—or the molecules that make up the impermanent object—do not magically materialise within the space, however. They are imported from my backyard, after suffering under the scorching sun and withstanding structural breakdown. In the gallery space, I imagine you can hear the quiet, vestigial sizzle of the sun-bleached boxes.
When human skin is left in the sun, it tans, burns, or freckles. This is not the case for hair. UV rays bleach hair, creating the naturally lightened effect worn by beachy girls and surfers. The two react to the sun differently because skin is alive, and hair is dead. Living things attempt to heal in the face of environmental or biological injury, while dead things atrophy. The sculptures Mia makes seem both dead and alive. In each space they occupy, new forms are generated from the same material. But the material itself is in its own process of deterioration. Each molecule holds the trace of unpredictable spaces, outside of context or control—a dying body charged with the vitality of regeneration.
The boxes themselves are designed to provide a structured and convenient vessel for bouquets of flowers. Their purpose is to be filled. What remains hidden in their current configuration is an open side that, if peered into, exposes the empty interior of the box. Evacuated of content and denied a point of entry through which material could fill the voided space—even denied the chance to peer in and see the emptiness for ourselves—the memories of the backyard, the car boot, the grad show sit flat on the surface. The deteriorating boxes preserve a secret, or a promise, of interiority. A depth disavowed by the immediacy of superficial trauma and the order of geometric patterns. The surface is all that matters—the memories cannot penetrate what is not there, what is missing inside, beneath. Yet the romantic idea of interior depth is not forgone.
Lois Vodicka