Archibald Prize 2019: Art Gallery of New South Wales

‘Firstly, the painting itself shifts between the perception of a surface and an impossible “space” within. Secondly, the subject of the painting exists between an interior space with hard wooden floors and an organic one; between a real space and an impossible one, without gravity. We may see a chair at first because we remember what a body being held by one looks like. But it is absent because the work is not only the representation of a tangible body in real space and time, but also its invisible self, manifested to overlay the real.’

‘From this we can see that the invisible self is also on the cusp of different definable states, precariously balanced somewhere between sitting, standing and falling; impossibly still within the many moving forces that surround her. In part this was a response to the shifts occurring within my larger practice. The resulting uncertainty and energy built like a charge within me, an invisible, immutable call to action.’

Natasha Walsh
A liminal space, 2019
oil on copper
87 x 80 cm