Sarah Drinan won’t clean herself up for the sake of appearances. As a figurative painter and occupational therapist, she welcomes inevitable chaos. The soft, anonymous bodies she depicts in her most recent show, Becoming Somewhere Else at Ames Yavuz gallery in Sydney, Australia—enlivened with oil, acrylic, charcoal, and pastel—represent somatic tension; each as vulnerable in the world as the next. “The process of painting,” Drinan tells me, “is at times arduous and difficult...Sometimes you feel directionless. Sometimes you feel unsafe.” Drinan, 30 years old and a nominee for the 2023 Ramsay Art Prize at the Art Gallery of South Australia (the country’s most prestigious award for artists under 40) describes her bouts of inspiration and painting as spontaneous—even accidental. All of a sudden, the pain dissolves and the whole thing may feel good again, and prizes like The Ramsay or nominations for traveling art scholarships and residencies roll in.

While the works and the act of painting itself reflect arduous discomfort, Drinan’s monthlong show, enriched by her shortcomings and triumphs, is a tangible example of the potential reward. “Relationships can feel like that too, right?” the artist asks, in reference to her painting process. “They can drain you and make you weak, but then you’ll have these moments of loving connection in which you realize you’ve created something almost otherworldly with another person...something that exists because of you.”

The cruel parts of love are the most disorienting. Love, Drinan says, has a positive association. The destruction that manifests under its umbrella is shocking, leaving us with versions of ourselves we no longer understand. Self- determination often becomes inaccessible at the onset of heartbreak—Drinan narrates the unrelenting pain that can only be a product of something so beautiful. Works “Lovers as Thieves” and “Bodies Together,” for instance, both express the indulgent nature of intimacy and the riskiness of giving yourself away.

Polite society vilifies loss of control. We often choose to suffer in secrecy, silent throughout the process of reclaiming our autonomy. Then, as if nothing ever changed, we emerge as “healed people;” self-proclaimed upgrades of who we were before. Drinan challenges this so-called polite secrecy in Becoming Somewhere Else, peeling back the exoskeleton of civility by compounding both compassion and fear in her paintings—visual accounts of what it feels like to lose what you once thought was permanent. An exposé of internal conflict, the compounding, fleshy tones of Drinan’s work communicate both the freedom and extreme disturbance of free falling.

“If you don’t embrace the uncertainty, it’s going to weigh you down and destroy you,” Drinan warns, inspired by the Irish folklore she fell in love with as a child. She touches on the fear-inducing nature of mythology—how disturbance at the hands of magical creatures is initially uninvited as they often represent potential for bad luck. “But also good luck,” Drinan reminds.

Púca, a shape-shifting entity in Irish mythology crouching in one of the show’s linen paintings, can bring both wreckage and guidance to those it meets. As many of these stories go, Drinan shares, the protagonist is on a horse (in this case, a púca in disguise), and the púca leads the rider on an unknown path, inevitably teaching the rider of their patience and resilience. “Stories throughout history, especially those rooted in oral tradition, hold these kinds of lessons...they sit within the context of culture and never lose their relevance,” she states. No radical difference exists between Drinan’s portrayal of human bodies and mythological entities. Reputed as a catalyst of change, the púca—a monster to young listeners—is just another part of being human to those who’ve grown up.

Humanity, in Drinan’s recent work, is genderless. Drinan’s bodies are divorced from sex. She feels compelled to move the conversation away from physical appearance and “the erotic,” as human processing—a concentration of both her therapeutic relationships and her painting— tends to culminate physically. “My earlier stuff was maybe a bit more perverted and exposed, but the compositions are meant to showcase lightness and playfulness, as well as darker, more serious feelings,” Drinan recalls. “We are the outcome of our desires and complexities.” Perversion doesn’t have to be sexual; it can exist through human understanding, the things we don’t talk to children about until they’ve become independently conscious.

“I’m hyper-aware of my body,” Drinan admits, describing the connection she feels as she paints, the vulnerability she’s channeled through the soft fleshiness of her art. There is a greatness in bodily connection—something she feels lucky to understand through the process of painting—yet most obviously limited by the distracting nature of society. “Painting can feel war-like—this push and pull...almost as if there’s a constant stream of tension,” Drinan says, exemplifying another way in which art mirrors her bodily relationship. But as she’s pushing and pulling, minimizing resistance with brush strokes across the canvas—she’s healing. “This goes back to all I’ve learned with occupational therapy, trying to cultivate safety in the body.”

We live in unprecedented times, Drinan notes, calling my attention to the volatile, post-inaugural political climate. Even as an Australian, she recognizes the sinister implications of the current US administration, having worked with Americans who can’t believe the intricacies of her government-funded psychosocial work—specifically, the personalized care she’s able to give patients regardless of their economic standing. “We’re seeing the ramifications of this compounded greed, the wealth disparity formed by late-stage capitalism.” Drinan emphasizes the importance of physical work, of finding a way (any way) to foster bodily connection in a world designed to separate us from ourselves.

So much of the tension splayed throughout Drinan’s paintings represents contradiction: there is a need for discomfort in the process of personal growth, but no room for it in the world of physical and psychological care. We feel shame when we feel lost because we lack communal support, but shame, isolation, and nakedness in the face of hardship may be among the most fated human experiences of them all. Becoming Somewhere Else blends personal evolution and the progression of time. Drinan’s paintings allow distress and childlike excitement to exist in the same room; an unpunishable kind of chaos. Her work implies the most unsettling interferences can also be the most restorative—hope is just as alive in moments of pain as it is in moments of serenity. Sarah Drinan will make you understand why our messes are methods of connection. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.