artist's profile: Sarah

It was at Michaelis where, in my honours year, I finally found my style and where my teachers encouraged me to develop it with a deeply buried concept to draw the viewer's eye to the works unknowinlgy.

A playful use of thick, voluminous enamel paints with subtle textures of text, lace, imprints, stencils, wax and layered paint helps to unbalance the peace. I worked with the notion of layers- peeling the untarnished layers, of perfection and beauty, away to reveal an exposed inner.The layers which build up our lives are created to match or contradict each other, and it is our choice whether we want to expose them, look for them or passively accept a comfortable place for them.
The layers presented before you embody all of these, but it is your choice as to which ones you consciously seek to acknowledge.

Using the notion of contemporary fairy tales, the subject matter, and its juxtaposition of textures and words, consciously and subtly discloses a widely acknowledged social phenomenon. This is the natural categorisation that we are born into, or that we slowly fall into, due to societal, familial and personal expectations and conditioning. We have a choice whether to bend to or break away from this.