The story of the boy who ignored all the warnings and flew too close to the sun was both an inspiration and a cautionary tale.

And, as Savage lay in hospital unable to move after breaking his neck, the story came back to him.

“I’ve been trying to decide whether or not that was me idolising my own accident or not, or a way of dealing with it,” he said.

His latest artwork, a haunting video installation showing him lying on the grass, as feathers float slowly around him, is the embodiment of his own mixed feelings about what has happened to him.

Director of the ANU’s Drill Hall Gallery director Terence Maloon saw the video in a show at the School of Art, where Savage is a student, and decided to install it on a screen in a room at the gallery, where it’s now showing.

Savage said the artwork was also about how he interpreted myths in general.

His own accident has become something of a myth, with the height of the building and the extent of his injuries morphing depending on who’s telling the story.

The accident happened four years ago, and although doctors told him he probably would never walk again, he has regained the use of his arms and legs, walking with difficulty and generally confined to a wheelchair.

And, like the general tenor of the stories about him, he is still sitting on the fence when it comes to his own attitude towards his disability.

“I don’t see it as being a massive tragedy,” he said.

“I accept my injury and the disability and everything that goes along with that as something that has happened, and that I just go along with.”

His video artwork is also a response to the poem by WH Auden, which itself was a response to a painting depicting the myth.

In it, Auden is touched by the way the various figures in the painting seem to proceed with daily life, even as Icarus has fallen into the sea in front of them.

For the artwork, Savage installed nine square metres of grass in a studio, and had his brother and a friend rig up a camera, climb a ladder and drop boxes of feathers down on to him as he lay on the grass.

The whole thing took around 15 takes, and the finished result was slowed down four times to give it a slightly unreal quality.

Savage said he liked the fact that no one was quite sure, by looking at the video, how it was achieved.

“I like that relationship between the constructed image and what’s real, and the idea of a constructed myth and what’s real and what’s not,” he said.