SJ Norman: Emerging and Experimental Arts Fellowship
SJ Norman was born on Gadigal lands, and has a Wiradjuri and Anglo-Celtic heritage. He is a fearless experimenter, a rigorous researcher, a critically engaged maker and a formidable performer.
SJ’s practice spans installation, sculpture, fiction, essays, poetry, video, sound and performance, including significant pieces of durational work.
His practice is both unique and vital to contemporary Australian art and critical discourse.
SJ works on the intersection between personal selves and cultural history, focussing his practice on de-colonial and queer methodology, directly informed by his lived reality as a non-binary trans person and a diasporic Koori.
SJ has toured, exhibited, performed and spoken extensively. His work has been featured in Italy, the UK, the US and across Australia.
As a writer, SJ’s pieces have placed in both the Judith Wright and Elizabeth Jolley Prizes. SJ’s first book of fiction, “Permafrost”, won the 2017 Kill Your Darlings Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript.
SJ’s ongoing work with ideas of ‘the body’ has brought wide attention to explorations and questions of this personal space, challenging and expanding concepts of what the body can feel, do and affect.
This fellowship will see SJ beginning a process of interdisciplinary research and experimentation on the Ecstatic as a physical, phenomenological and socio-corporeal field of experience.
The research will be presented through a book, live performance and a series of curatorial projects. The cross-disciplinary nature of this work means that the research and public outcomes will make an impact across artforms, organisations and geographies, adding to SJ’s history of engaging different worlds, spaces and thoughts through his work.
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Learn more about The Dreaming Award.