Sarah Howe

Consider Falling is a series about fragmentation and perspective. It is rooted in research into the anxiety disorders Derealisation (the condition wherein a person feels the reality surrounding them is unreal) and Depersonalisation (a feeling of detachment from oneself, or that oneself is unreal). Through interviews with those experiencing these disorders, I was able to go someway towards empathising with the conditions, their affecting metaphors manifesting a sense of the slippages experienced more generally in daily life. The sensation of watching life unfold as if observed through a screen, the constant grief felt through the loss of true connection, when all that you once cared for is shrouded in an impenetrable surface. How must it feel when what one imagines to be cohesively ‘real’, that socially-agreed contract of existence, becomes splintered? This work, composed of mediated fragments — gifs, text and sound — attempts to exhibit such sensation. Through disjointed compositions, making fictions from fragments of subject’s interviews and the repetition of observed anxiety gestures, isolated and mechanised, the individual works accumulate to create a subtly unsettling experience. Empathy with the feeling of a fluctuation in perspective, felt by us all to some degree, is explored through visual breakdown, acoustic ruptures and infiltration. A narrator’s voice persistently tries to merge with a series of transcribed interviews between the artist and subjects suffering from the disorders, and in turn, the audience experiencing the work.