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Sarah Rose >

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Writing by Harriet Wild

“It’s going to rain tonight.”
“It’s raining now.”
“The radio said tonight.”
“Just because it’s on the radio doesn’t mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.”
“Our senses?  Our senses are wrong more often than they’re right… There’s no past, present of future outside our own mind.”

From White Noise by Don DeLillo

I once read somewhere that if all the atoms in a 50-cent piece were the size of tennis balls; they would cover the globe in a layer that was several centimetres thick.  I marvelled at this calculation, trying to imagine how scientists had exploded a coin to count all the atoms, like one would count the bones from some newly discovered, prehistoric creature.  It was almost as if they turned that dense little disc inside-out, changing scale as simply as changing state, from solid to liquid, liquid to gas.

A mound of grey cotton sits delicately in the galley space. The form is ant-hill like; the cotton the colour of iron filings, a material which seems to freeze into snowflake forms, under the influence of a magnetic field.  The thin tendrils of cotton begin to spread out, creating a smudgy blur rather than a clearly defined outline, almost feeling for space within its surroundings: its presence could be almost alien, a distant relative of Cousin It in the Addams Family.  The familiarity of the material is disquieting – the dull, same grey found in building materials, school uniforms and winter skies is here rewoven, and as dense chaos emerges.  One is uncertain as to whether it inhabits our linear, three-dimensional plane, or perhaps it is a kind of residue, superfluous matter from another, invisible world.

The cotton-mound is behind the glass window of the gallery, which here acts as a kind of sensory deprivation tank, suspending both time and movement, as in Ken Russell’s Altered States, where the protagonist subjects himself to a series of time and evolution-altering experiments.  The work commands attention – it quietly leeches onto the viewer, like a black hole absorbing light energy, operating on the periphery of concrete notions of time, place and materiality.

If the gallery space acts as a time-incubator, then the installation set outside this controlled and stabilised environment is an experiment in determining the effects of real time.  A drawing is gradually eroded by a solarium light over the duration of the exhibition – it is a work evolving in real time, in a constant state of entropy.  Invisible physical forces slip between solid planes present throughout the installation – surfaces are created, outlines defined and subverted.  The solarium light gradually decays the surface and matter of the drawing, diminishing its presence; the simple structure of the table on which it rests reflects the hard edges of the galley-tank, structures for containment and observation. 

The placement of the floor tiles on the boundary of the two spaces highlights the difference between the two, and suggests an attempt to literally “cross over”, passing from one state to another, solid to liquid, living creature to ghost.  I find in Sarah Rose’s works a sense of ‘blooming material’ as forms quietly fold out after one another, similar to the way the atoms will haemorrhage across the surface of the earth when they are exploded to the size of tennis balls.