Objective Art

Indigespace is an initiative of the team at Performance Space that provides support and opportunity for development to mid-career Indigenous artists. An artist of mixed British and Aboriginal descent, Sarah-Jane Norman used her 2012 Indigespace residency to further examine the lingering effects – personal, private, public, physical – that Australia's history of colonisation has brought about. The resulting work, a series of performances and installations nestled in a semi-transparent house titled Unsettling Suite, first began in 2006, though time is an important part of the practice for Norman.

“It's just my natural inclination as an artist to seek out as many conceptual and material vocabularies as possible. Effectively I start with an idea and then I figure out how to do it, a process which can take years. Unsettling Suite contains a number of elements all subtly interwoven: movement/action-based performance, sculpture, photography, digital and analogue video, sound, embellished ceramics, weaving, tapestry, bone carving, piercing…”
This almost-exhaustive list of media is inseparable from the house itself, the installation and its contents serving to feed the other's purpose and meaning. “They feed each other cyclically – the structure of the installation goes in first, the transparent walls of the house itself. The performances happen inside that space, it frames the actions themselves. In turn the traces of each performance are left behind in the space and are allowed to accumulate, and they become the evolving content of the installation,” says Norman. “Everything in the space has to be both statically interesting as an art object and also fulfil some kind of performance 'function' when called upon. This brings a sense of potential and mystery to every object in the space; it brings the house to life.”

Norman views the use of the 'body' as the unifying edict of her practice, and it is through her examination of that form that the lingering history of colonisation was approached in Unsettling Suite. “As a performance artist, the nexus of body and discourse is my terrain. It's a mainstay of critical theory that all discourse is embodied, that we live discourse through the body. We carry a phenomenal amount of information in our bodies, a lot of which is ancestral. We carry trauma and we carry secrets, we carry the imprints of other bodies, we carry the living and the dead, we carry our parents and anyone who has ever loved or injured us. Our body is the natural domain of all the things we don't understand.

“I suppose it's my early training in theatre and dance that has led me to situate myself first and foremost as a body, which is thinking and feeling and expressive of truths which are outside of language.”

Norman's work will be performed at Carriageworks as part of the Matters Of Life & Death, a program curated by Performance Space that brings together a collection of ideas about aging, longevity, ancestry, extinction and the anxieties of the living. The program also features performer/choreographer Brian Lucas; UK theatre company Reckless Sleepers; a night of short works, Live And Let Die, guest curated by Eddie Sharp, and more.