'Prepostions' - Anna Sabadini (Nyisztor Gallery)

'Prepositions' - Anna Sabadini

A few years ago I got stuck in my art practice. I lost my confidence.

One day, procrastinating, I started flicking through an old visual diary and it lit me up. The freshness, the excitement and urgency of being an art student were there. Inside a folio on yellowed pieces of paper, the student was evident – in the over and understatements, the cack- handedness, and in the occasional moments of brilliance. There was such a thirst to learn, responding to materials, to ideas, to set exercises, or following vague impulses with all the fearlessness of not understanding failure.

I saw my younger self in my early work with all the concerns that have occupied the past ten years already there. In looking at this work, I was once again becoming an artist rather than self- consciously already there. I was ...beside myself with excitement.

Prepositions describe subjects in relation to one another. They place them. Words such as through, against, over, under, in between, beyond. The hat is on the fridge. The brook is by the field, which is across the road, which is within the shire boundaries. These words do not so much describe how a particular field is, or what the hat looks like, but provide physical descriptions of placement in relation to.

All the works in this exhibition are made reworking student work. I like the awkward look of the student work because it speaks of learning, discovery, and the rapid movement of creative development. The very thing I felt to have lost. The old work offers rejuvenation to my present place, a possible forward movement from here. I like the battered look of the work now. It speaks of all this repositioning. Through, by, over, under, across.

In a sentence, prepositions convey relationships of agency, comparison, direction, place, possession, purpose, source and time. By describing the placement of one thing in relation to another, prepositions require that you hold both subjects in mind for consideration. The sense of orientation comes from understanding context.

Creativity is an expression of relationships with the world – it places us, attentive and taking it all in. Creativity is also a relationship between self and growth. It too involves agency, comparison, direction, place, possession, purpose, a source, and time. I ‘am’ in relation to past experiences. I don’t leave an ‘old’ self behind, but revisit and incorporate it. Growth is a constant bringing together of selves, a consideration of pre-positions, of entirety.

A new body of work often starts with inchoate impulses, which reach through symbolic means back into the past (experience) and, simultaneously, toward the future (the new work; where one wants to go). In this other definition, becoming is the most mysterious preposition of all.