STATEMENT OF WORK

Sarah Sands Phillips is engaged in a multi-disciplinary process-oriented exploration of impermanence. Spanning painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, moving image, and text, she is interested in material knowledge, fragmentation, and the regeneration of objects.  By exploring intuitive sites of presence and absence, she finds ways of documenting the dissolving and translucent space between identity, intention, and the skin.

Influenced by new materialisms, Sands Phillips’ practice looks for the connections between, and seeks to level anthropocentric hierarchies by allowing work to both make itself, and also leave room for common materials and detritus –grapefruit peels, edamame skins, poetry edits, plastic carry bags– to be elevated. Her work sometimes consists of found objects in weathered states which contain the residues of human presence. The temporality of some materials parallels her interest in the body. The often labour intensive nature of her practice lends itself to conversations around connection and touch. 

Through everyday observations, her practice is ultimately poetic in its dissolution. Utilising cyclical processes of layering and erasure results in a ritual undoing and reimagining of objects and surfaces.  In many ways her work acts as a document, tracing languages of time, intimacy, and loss. Her research forms ways of understanding her Indigenous identity, and how information and experiences are embedded within matter.