Self Storage and the Really Real looks at ways we authenticate experience and store memory in object and place. The work’s hero items and landscapes, which hold significant memories from a specific place and time, such as hydrangeas from my childhood home or my friend’s mother, shells from the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Norfolk Pines from various Instagram posts and landscapes from past and present relationships. These landscapes and objects act like souvenirs, which ‘speak to a context of origin through a language of longing’. Deliberate compositional and pictorial elements resemble digital screens/devices and thus reference ways we communicate, share and validate experience in contemporary society.
Abstracted elements are suggestive of homes, rooms, walls, ceilings, skies, wombs and landscapes and therefore imply a sense of longing, anticipation and narrative. The work furthermore uses exchanges between abstraction/figuration and foreground/background to embed process and play with notions of meaning and context.
Born in Lismore, NSW, Sally Anderson began her undergraduate studies in Visual Art at Southern Cross University before transferring to the College of Fine Art (COFA) in Sydney. Most recently Anderson was awarded the prestigious Brett Whiteley Travelling Arts Scholarship 2017, a three month residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris which is administered by the Art Gallery of New South Wales to further her art’s education. Collections include Southern Cross University, New South Wales as well as private collections in Australia, England, Canada and USA.
