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Installation: Vigil (Secretariat Room)

Artist: Peta Murray

Title: Vigil/Wake

An intimate, two-part experience where we contemplate what matters most as a life ends, and together remember our dead.

 “…something altogether different, an immersive ritualised work.” Australian Stage, on Missa Pro Venerabilibus by Peta Murray (2016)

In this pair of works, designed to be experienced sequentially (vigil, then wake) participants are invited to contemplate their experiences of loss, before joining a work of communal ritual and ephemeral meaning-making with artist-researcher Peta Murray.

Vigil takes the form of an installation. It is designed to be experienced alone in short sittings (up to 10 minutes or so, but with the precise duration determined by the individual). Vigil employs sound, light, and other sensory prompts to invite silent contemplation and to call up memories. Vigil invites us to sit with the knowledge of our own mortality and the big and little losses of our lives. How do we meet such loss? How might we prepare for these endings?

After keeping vigil you will be invited to sign up for one of the three sessions of the companion work, Wake.

A collective ritual of memorialisation, Wake will be a space for creation and conversation, focused on each other, our lives and our loved ones. How do we remember those we have lost? And how may we mourn the unmourned?

An intimate experience in two parts, Vigil/Wake crosses the borders between art and health, asking how endings, grieving and even death itself  might be re-imagined as creative acts.

By Peta Murray and collaborators Rachel Burke, Jane Murphy and Thembi Soddell.

Dates: 13, 14 and 15 October.

Times: Installation is open 8am to 6pm daily. No booking required, but be prepared for a brief wait as it may only be experienced one person at a time.

Location: The Secretariat Room, Fairmont, Leura

Duration: Up to the visitor

Note: This is an immersive work, using sound and light. Once you have attended VIGIL, you will be invited to attend a session of WAKE.