Shadowy image of an art installation including a bed frame and sculptures within a glass vitrine.

S.J Norman, "The Great Plague," 2013; mixed materials (sugar, timber, glass, iron, found objects); dimensions variable; photo by Heidrun Lohr

S.J Norman

Australia
Interdisciplinary
Artist in Residence, 2023
Artist in Residence, 2020
www.sarahjanenorman.com

A shadowy portrait of a person.

Artist Statement

I am a cross-disciplinary artist, writer, and curator. I have been working for 15 years, and my practice has embraced a diversity of disciplines and formal outcomes, including solo and ensemble performance, installation, sculpture, text, video, and sound. I am a non-binary transmasculine person and a diasporic Koori of Wiradjuri heritage, born on Gadigal land. My practice is routed through the volatile interstices of the social and the corporeal—I work with the body as both site and material. I frequently utilise relational and process-based choreographies as a mode of structural critique; I am interested in the space between bodies, the forces that occupy it, and how the live act might be utilised as a means to examine, disrupt, and re-inscribe prevailing systems of social power.

While at Headlands

While in residence at Headlands I will be working on a number of curatorial and writing projects. In my capacity as co-curator of the unique Indigenous cultural and artistic gathering Knowledge of Wounds (which had its inaugural season at Performance Space New York in January 2020), I will be working to build community and bioregional connections to Ohlone lands in order to support an iteration of the event here. I will also be working on the first draft of a new work of lyrical non-fiction, Blood From a Stone, and the final draft of my debut short story collection, Permafrost.