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| There will be a reception in the Gallery on Sunday, July 8th between 2 and 4 for the opening of Sarah Rose Willett’s Trans-Forms. |
About
the artist
Sarah
Rose Willett graduated from Grenfell Campus, Memorial University in 2010 with a
BFA. Currently she lives in Corner
Brook, where she continues to work and participate in the ever-growing
community of artists in Western Newfoundland.
In her work, Sarah has explored the
connections between animals and humans, combining oil paints with textiles and
other media to capture both the raw and the delicate in the natures of her
subjects. Sarah examines that moment when the human slips into the animal in
shape and desire: she analyzes the flesh and the fleshly on physical and
meta-physical levels.
Trans-Forms - Artist’s Statement
This
body of work began with three paper panels that I created out of recycled paper
pulp, sculpted to take on abstract organic forms. These panels inspired the
seven encaustic paintings in this show which are sculptures on canvas using a
recycled material, beeswax, to suggest organic natural forms through textured
abstraction. Because we often take for granted the materials that surround us
and waste what is most usable, I hope to show the importance of these through
my use of beeswax and recycled paper.
Like peat, ice and rock, beeswax
preserves life forms. The kelp, bird’s skull, shells, honeycomb and sea urchin
you see here have been built with layers of melted wax brushed on to the canvas. Preserved, fossilized,
transformed.
A
note on Sarah’s
Figures 1 & 2 (archival
pigment prints)
by Jennifer
Oille Sinclair
A
proportion of the rag paper in Willett’s panels originated as photographic
prints I’d rejected and discarded, the pulp moulded into panels in casket-like
forms. The panels are life size and bear the imprints of Willett’s body. So it
seemed logical to photograph this reincarnation, which I’ve called Sarah’s
Figures 1 & 2,
in a Greenspond graveyard, and print the images on the same kind of paper that
generated them.
