Sarah crowEST

Sarah crowEST
the inexplicable magnetism of an alien object

Born: 1957, London Lives and works: Melbourne

“Here in the studio, I am immersed in materiality – dealing with matter as something dynamic, continuously making and unmaking itself. I’m tending to take a ‘non-dominant’ role with the materials, accepting and recuperating the stuff that comes my way. I incorporate my own residue like used coffee grounds, newspapers or leftovers brought to me when people have seen how I work. I also utilise clay, fabric, pulped paper, wood and paint, using kilns to fire lumpen ceramics and the foundry to cast bronze rocks, creating indeterminate forms and mounds. Donated polystyrene becomes figure or furniture before de-forming then agglomerating into these massed shapes. Objects go through multiple mutations – a quilt becomes a costume before it turns into a rock. Everything evolves like that unceasingly.

I began my PhD project by investigating humour in art. The humour I was interested in was resistant to strategic enquiry through art practice. Being essentially unruly, it emerges unbidden in unexpected places.

The crucial element of surprise operates like a short circuit. So I began working with the indeterminate – embracing not knowing what I was doing. Much of my research centres on ‘the artist’ entering into that zone of not knowing, non-thinking and intuition… what is it good for?

There can be something completely mysterious about a mound – you don’t know what’s in it, what inhabits it or what it consists of. My past work has been quite figurative, exaggerating human behaviours, using my body and performing as an object. I wanted to eliminate my self in the work and just deal with what is beyond my preconceptions. It’s a slippery undertaking producing an object that could be nothing or could be something. I’m always astonished by what people project onto these configurations of matter.Some find these forms really ugly and abject but I see them as an unquantifiable excess, both seductive and strange. The tendency is to see a coffee-ground textured shape and immediately think it’s scatological, like a big poo. Well, that’s just what others may think or perceive – to me it’s a beauty in its rich brownness! To me the tense oddness of the forms is attractive.”

Sarah crowEST, the inexplicable magnetism of an alien object, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne, 10 February – 3 March, 2012.

Photography by Jake Walker – artstudiovisit.blogspot.com