out of sorting the out of sorts (2019)

“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.

Images courtesy of Christopher Arblaster and Steph Fuller