Falling off the floor

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Background: This painting developed via a long-term research focus on ideas around being within unsettled conditions informed by feelings fluidity in our lives. The research investigates ideas of agency and passivity to reflect on how unstructured and unpredictable contexts may affect individual and collective psyches. This research is supported by Rebecca Fortnum and Elizabeth Fisher in their investigations into working via the merging of conscious and unconscious approaches to art practice (2013). The research is also informed by Boris Groys’ ideas that instability and uncanniness are central features of our times and that it is difficult to grasp our reality (2016).

Significance: This painting poses the question that perhaps it’s not possible to devise an overarching view of our world and we should opt for a survival strategy of radical momentariness, where fragments can be experienced as a totalising instance. ‘Falling off the floor’, puts forward the idea that to be in the contemporary is to experience life as an accumulation of ubiquitous and peculiar moments. Rather than seeking structure within this tumult we could consider the chaotic moments as a sequence of equivalences where what matters is not a rationale, but rather, feeling our way forward.

Contribution: The inaugural Sorrento Art Prize was selected by committee, with the prize awarded to Gareth Sansom, one of Australia’s most respected contemporary artists. The prize was judged by Alexander Grishin AM, FAHA, Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University.