Of Line and Form

About

Sarah explores her ideas through printmaking, painting, and ceramics and is interested in how perception affects our ecological awareness and thinking. Working with clay (manufactured, recycled or wild) allows her to explore issues of materiality and sustainability.

Her work seeks to disrupt habitual perspectives through the liminality of the objects and spaces she creates

She often fuses sound and/or moving image into final installations of her work as in Objects listening which was recently exhibited at the British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-on-Trent.

Kirsten has been a professional artist since 1991 when she graduated from Dartington College of Art, Devon, with a first-class degree in Art and Social Contexts.

Admitting the Possibilities of Error is an ongoing series of conceptual drawings which she began in 2013, each of which marks a different circumstance or event - some quotidian - the happenstance of an accidental mark, the line produced by a particular pen, others momentous: turning sixty, a solar eclipse, the war in Ukraine.

Beginning with the outline of a circle, which she tries to copy perfectly, each forms a meditation on fallibility; ‘I am not perfect, my mind wanders, my hand wobbles, I make mistakes. In creating them I ‘admit errors’, giving my limitations latitude and celebrating the resulting patterns, recalling as they do fingerprints, tree rings or map contours. Rather than frustration realising them brings me focus, humility and comfort.’

In contemporary culture mistakes are largely regarded a source of shame to be compensated for erased and regretted. A less punitive approach - one that holds human error tenderly - allows instead for the idea that our failings can support growth, discovery, learning and change. Kirsten shares these drawings to open up conversations about mistakes, their impact upon us, upon others, upon the world. ‘My wish is that they will act as a catalyst for conversation, reflection and hope’.

The exhibition will be featured in our Garden Gallery alongside our two other exhibitions in the remaining spaces