Heat, 2010

three channel HD video installation
5 min 52 sec
edition of 5 + 2 AP

Heat is a three channel video installation (shown here on one screen). Three young Indigenous women, all sisters, are staring back at the camera, their faces and bare shoulders framed by the camera and their long dark hair. They are the daughters of the influential curator Hetti Perkins who is the daughter of prominent Aboriginal activist Charlie Perkins. Perkins was the first Aboriginal person to gain a degree and the first Aboriginal person to become a permanent head of a federal government department.

Thompson has used a background of plain yellow/orange and a warm light on the girls’ skin. An off screen fan causes the long hair of the girls to swirl around the screen. The colour of the image and the ‘wind’ is a depiction of the heat of the desert from central Queensland, which is his father’s country that Thompson visited often as a boy.