SALLYANNE MORGAN

From the artist: “Flight & Other Stories” is an exploration of aspiration, disillusionment, faith and pessimism. I began making the first of these works during a time of personal disappointment. Given the current culture of carefully curating an online self and the ever expanding self improvement industry I found a certain, almost heretical shame not only in acceptance of failure (unless expressed as a means toward a victorious end) but of questioning the “irrational devotion to a narrative of self improvement” (Alain de Botton). In an effort to work against this “Disneyesque” version of reality, I started to wonder how various belief constructs, like religion; luck or hope itself, in conflict with feelings of pessimism, would look in the figurative form. I tried to do this with pathos and hopefully some humour. Symbols such as tattoos, feathers, nails and knives represent items of security or to illustrate frustrations of aspiration. In some of the work body parts are changed to flowers or enlarged, to animate internal beliefs. “Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.” – Carl Jung