SALLY ANDERSON

SKY CEILING

4 TO 21 MAY 2022

‘The sequence of doors we passed made me think of all the rooms of my past and future. The hospital ward I was born in, classrooms, tents, churches, offices, hotels, museums, nursing homes, the room I’ll die in. (Has it been built yet?) Cars’re rooms. So are woods. Skies’re ceilings. Distances’re walls. Wombs’re rooms made of mothers.’
David Mitchell, Black Swan Green (2006)

‘156. Why is the sky blue? -A fair enough question, and one I have learned the answer to several times. Yet every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it to myself, it eludes me. Now I like to remember the question alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal.’
Maggie Nelson, Bluets (2009)

‘The sky was exactly the colour of my shirt, I realised while striding toward the studio.’
Patrick Hartigan, Offcuts (2019)

Sky Ceiling explores an intersection of personal domestic space and second-hand experiences of landscape. Domestic objects such as vessels, vases and jars are paired with seemingly unrelated seascapes, floating mountains, and vistas, mostly borrowed from saved screenshots of friend’s social media stories.

Themes of containment and notions of ‘being held’ run through these works. Holding, letting go of and reaching for objects, memories of birth held in banksias, housing commission homes in hydrangeas, wombs inside rooms, homes holding sky blue ceilings, skies resting on tabletops, rooftops, holidays contained by screenshots and screens , frames and edges.

These paintings present and play with notions of still life and landscape proposing they are not objective genres but rather subjective, symbolic, and historic; devices for holding history, meaning, association and memory. The rooftops initially made their way into these works to incorporate ‘ocean views’ and ‘water glimpses’ from images I sourced from realestate.com, but as this body of work was realised during the devastating Northern Rivers floods (and Mum tells me I was born during a Flood in Lismore) the now ‘floating rooftops’ took on a whole new meaning. A reminder that meaning is out of our control, it’s not fixed but fluid, and we all see through our own Intimate personal and psychological experience.

Sally Anderson : Sky Ceiling, 2022