Sarah gets ahead of the posse
by Noel Towell
Sarah CrowEST says that she has a compulsion to anthropomorphise all manner of blobs and lumps.
It leads her to play with forms and materials that seem to evolve into "vulnerable, desiring, unstable bodies."
The result is Doodle Posse, one of a series of works that has earned Sarah the first annual Constance Gordon-Johnson prize for sculpture and innovation. The $1,500 prize will be awarded each year to an outstanding graduate from the Bachelor of Visual Arts program at the SA School of Art who has an interest in sculpture and installation.
Sarah’s winning body of work consists of four installations: Doodle Posse, Hard Things (“a reflection on things left unspoken”), Untitled (a response to silly subject lines that found their way into the artist’s e-mail inbox), and Tree Mites (a series of cute creatures cast in bronze). Not a bad effort for what Sarah describes as “about a semester’s worth of work.”
The prize is named in honour of the late Constance Gordon-Johnson – artist, community arts worker, designer and educator. Constance’s mother, Judy Cobb, travelled from Memphis Tennessee to attend the exhibition at Underdale campus’ N Gallery.
The work of three other artists was featured in the exhibition: Melania Von De’Bour’s Dual Tragedy, Graham Kenefick’s ARTMAN and Anna Medlin’s Another wave.
More work from Sarah – now an honours student at UniSA’s South Australian School of Art – is in the pipeline. “I want to continue the idea of the heads in Doodle Posse,” she says. “I’m working on a series of large, prosthetic heads for some performance based activities where I become one of the creatures.”