Mike Parr was born with a partially formed left arm and much of his work has been a resistance to the idea of a definitive, cohesive self. In the early 1980s, he began a series of drawings that would form the basis of his ongoing Self Portrait Project. He has since produced hundreds of artworks, in a variety of media, in which he breaks down and disfigures his physical form to privilege the changeable, incoherent and contradictory nature of identity. Parr has said:

This is what [the Project] has taught me. Any image is always a provisional construct. You can never stabilise a representation. It can never be the repository of value in the sense that we want to attribute value to art.

The title of this drawing includes several references to conditional states. Aptly, the artwork features an anamorphic portrait that is only fully legible when viewed at an oblique angle.