Back GALLERY: Nat Penney (SA) - out of sorting the out of sorts

Opening - 5:30 PM - Wednesday, 2nd August

Artist Talks - 6:00pm

Running - 3rd - 19th August 2017

“You’re out of sorts

                                so sort it out”

In ‘out of sorting the out of sorts’ Nat Penney questions typical understandings and
treatments of disorientation. Where the disorientated or ‘the wanderers’ are commonly
categorised as the unstable, requiring systematic medicalization, she suggests that there’s
more to the wandering minds of this estranged collective.

Penney presents the dichotomy of orientation and disorientation as a duality that, when
combined in a harmonious union, has the potential to be a source of creative outcome, of
reaching new forms of awareness. It’s here that ‘out of sorting the out of sorts’ rests in its
state of unrest. The performative installation attempts to recreate states of uncertainty in
order to unpack the perils and pleasures of spatial and psychological disorientation.

Combining the everyday object with constructed matter in obscure and foreign
configurations of saturated confusion and segmented vision, this place could be fast and
jarring when devoured whole but when consumed in fragments and with intention there’s

the prospect of pleasure within the pieces. It is the artist’s intention to transport the
participator through this unexpected combination of sensory engagers to break down sense
of place; to warp, tangle and twist, forcing a search for restructured understandings.

Search for sense, sort the sorts.

By creating this saturated sensory space, she chooses to confront the unsettled and anxious
in a demanding act of recognition in an attempt to redirect our relationships with these
experiences and allow them to shift us to new ways of thought.

Photography by Steph Fuller