I worked in a shop that masqueraded as a gallery and my reading at the time was always telling me that art should not match the cushions. Contemporary art was about ideas.

I saw Fiona Connor’s artwork in an exhibition titled Can Do Academy at Hopkinson Mossman and read in the accompanying text that it expanded on “a quiet cacophony of daily pressures.” There in the gallery was a beautiful painting, a dark-pink stain and a violently sublime sunburst of drips emanating from a sink.

The pressure of a tap, the moment of initial hesitant contact or the release of pent-up water. I was once on a date where he would tap his glass instinctively whenever I held eye contact for longer than was decorous. The release was something spectacular.

The house has seen many transformations. There is the wall behind the bookshelf in the bedroom where the child used to collect and smear the detritus after picking her nose, now painted greige but sometimes lumpen on the grain. There is the circle on the bench where you, tipsy and impetuous, opened another bottle of wine. That same night you stumbled into the bathroom, smeared your lipstick with your palm and absentmindedly used that same palm to steady yourself against the cupboard near the toilet. To leave it there for the next dweller seemed criminally affected and seductively brash.

You once used bleach spray on the dishwasher and it dripped down the exterior like Coca Cola erodes your teeth. Another person had the epiphany of trying to clean the whole surface in abrasive motions to mirror the effect, but now it’s peeling and streaky and somewhere down the line it became a repository for magnets and notes.

There are words that people use to describe art, such as taxonomy, patina, incidental, active, production. Trying, but not so hard as to be laboured. Fitting within a lineage but testing this in new ways. It is a conscious gesture, a way to articulate something about the world as it is now but also to transform how we might see it. A brooding infidelity to the scene at its surface, because the visible does not hold truth for everyone.

I worked in a shop that masqueraded as a gallery and sometimes my boss would leave big booty girls on the screen after a late night of whiskey and limply stacked oysters. The chair was stained with correction fluid but on those following mornings it looked particularly dank. I wanted the art to be the cushion so that the story could become more fantastical than it was.

Having just broken up with someone I loved very much, and feeling trepid but hopeful, I looked at the sink. I realised, not for the first time but certainly most resoundingly, that there was no secret to unlocking art that was classified contemporary. That it was a view into someone else’s moment, a way of seeing that pinpoints a blip of universal experience. I wanted so badly to live beside Fiona Connor’s sink because I wanted the cacophony to hum and to celebrate the passages of time that are punctuated by nonsense and mess. I wanted to remember this most recent relationship before I forgot how to articulate why it was so special.