Hot Mess

What happens when you don’t sleep for two years? You begin to live in a world that is in-between, where time moves painfully slow and impossibly fast all at once, where you are never fully awake or fully asleep. When you don’t sleep for two years, you don’t simply become tired, you become hollow.

"Hot Mess" is a new body of work, which includes sculptures and works on paper. These works grew out of a period of rupture, taking inspiration from the physical and psychological landscape of postpartum delirium. After giving birth, I found myself inhabiting a body that felt both ravaged and newly formed.

Working intuitively the figures I’ve created feel as if they are becoming something, or perhaps are coming undone, humorous, tender, grotesque and absurd. Through these works I want to explore transformation not as a clean transition but as something messy, bodily, and unfettered.

Pip Ryan is an Australian artist based in Narrm/Melbourne. Her practice explores humour, irony and the absurd through drawing, sculpture, installation and video. Her works present a multitude of imagined creatures and characters including hybrid animals, disembodied figures and darkly comical beasts. Ryan is interested in using colour and playful forms to engage with dark and surreal subject matter, exploring the junction between the personal and the imagined world. She also collaborates with her sister Natalie Ryan exhibiting under The Ryan Sisters.

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