SARAH ROBERTS
Sarah Roberts is a Welsh Artist living and working in Leeds. She is Co-founder and Curator at Hyde Park Art Club and Shelf London, and is an Associate lecturer. Sarah works with objects, media and images amassing them into complex curated installations and multimedia works. Her dynamic body of work spans sculpture, drawing, collage and installation.
Sarah draws inspiration from everyday life, combining mundane materials like plaster, concrete and plastic with domestic detritus and industrial leftovers to create new regenerative environments on an architectural scale. Often incorporating seemingly bizarre blends of material like fans, gravel, glitter, vinyl and lace, the selections are in fact drawn from real spaces. Casinos, beaches, multicoloured terraces – all re-represented with their guts out and glad rags on, a combination exposed wires and glittered plasters or pound shop purchases with careful ceramic counterparts. Sarah pays attention to generously balancing of playful spaces with underpinning ecological concerns around sustainability.
Sarah originally trained as a sociologist, this is reflected in her obsessive taxonomies and non-hierarchical approach to installation – there is a clear duality in the work, in trying to simplify things but producing this mass complexity of material.
A true collector, she experiments -mixing industrial materials with ephemeral everyday objects she comes across in aesthetically rich environments like hospitals, spa’s or pound shops. There is a new tantric power to artificial space and objects- an ability of ‘smooth’ manmade space to allow us to relax [ spa’s], to be studious [schools], to be energetic [gyms], to be sick [hospitals]. These spaces have delineated purpose so we can exist as organic bodies ‘safely’ within them and a clear ‘weird’ yet accepted aesthetic.
In the broadest sense, her installations allow us to question the value that we place on objects and how objects give meaning to the spaces we inhabit. Offering a moment to navigate the proliferation of objects and images in everyday life, making visible the intimate systems, taxonomies and ecologies in which materials carry meaning. On a more personal level, Sarah is processing her own personal back catalogue of ephemera and trauma. Keeper of her own archive, with personal experience of familial hoarding and estate clearance, she operates from an internal position in this compulsive arrangement we have with ‘stuff’.
From her vantage point of the artist hoarder, she looks at the world though a personal lens of materiality. Creating installations, texts and collages that reflect on moments, cities, public spaces – and in turn offer new emotionally charged spaces, bodies, architectures, landscapes for the viewer to encounter.
“We have distanced ourselves from nature. From the sublime. We trust the too blue hue of a spa better than the sea.” The similar, constructed materiality of Sarah’s installations seeks not acceptance or judgement, but to highlight the complexity of the set up. To create a new space for viewers as bodies to have a sense of the sublime, to feel their own organic edges up against the imperfect plastics, and the displaced mirrored MDF bedsteads she creates. Using tools of excess, colour and scent, she distils life’s ‘busyness’ into her installations, and provides the viewer with a space for ‘looking’, a meditation on a fast, full and changing world that we as humans cannot understand and consume easily.
Sarah holds a First Class BA from Chelsea College of Art and a BA in Sociology from Leeds University. Selected group shows include Leeds Artists Show, Leeds Art Gallery, LOTUS EATERS, Aindrea Contemporary, and The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Solo shows include, Everything’s Mustard, Picnic Gallery 2019 & Saatchi Art 2022, ‘CLODDI‘, Arcade Gallery, Cardiff and Torremolinos Tableaux Tongue Twister (Aftersun) at Block 336, London. Roberts has been selected for YSI Sculpture Network, IN- RUINS, Chisenhale Into The Wild, Parasol Unit Exposure Award 2014, and Saatchi New Sensations.
