Sarah Strachan

I am interested in how our perception of being in, knowing and belonging to the world affects our ecological awareness and thinking. In my multi-disciplinary practice I approach environmental changes through research, collaboration and deep connections with the land, its people and its materials. I explore my ideas through printmaking, painting and ceramics, as a means of making sense of the world, often fusing sound and/or moving image into the final installation. Situated in the context of the Arte Povera and land art movements, my work seeks to question, or disrupt, habitual perspectives through the liminality of objects, materials and spaces.

 

Liminal vessels, 2020

Ceramics, latex, wire thread, black floor panel. 30 x 50x 100 cm

Liminal vessels consists of ceramic vessels caught in tightly stretched skin-like latex, which dig deep into our ambiguous feelings towards the flesh. Ceramics and skin both functioning as containers or carriers of matter and meaning.

The interaction of materials creates a sense of the interstitial moments – transition between seemingly coherent worlds or spaces of objects and beings - charged with meaning and causality. The work explores the liminal state between body and object, between corporeal and non-corporeal. The notion of the skin as both a materiality and the site of relationality makes it possible to describe bodies more generally outside the human and its hierarchies of difference.

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Conscious crystal, 2020

Photopolymer etching on southbank coarse 310 gsm. 38 x 99 cm

Captured and suspended in time these hauntingly beautiful crystal formations are created through the deposition of calcium carbonate or chalk on glass. Normally invisibly, held as a solute in water, the emergence of these ancient materials connect us to deep geologic time – and material memories of extinction linked to a previous rise in sea level.