Gasworks London and the New Zealand Friends of Gasworks are pleased to announce that the 2021 Residency has been awarded to Sarah Rose and that Sarah will be living and working at Gasworks, from Oct – Dec of this year. It is very heartening to see the arts institutions in London re-opening and residencies, like this one, being possible again.

Sarah’s Project in London:

For the residency at Gasworks, Sarah plans to spend time with the curators and conservators of the Palentology collection at the Natural History Museum. Her research will consider the practices of care for these objects many of which are replicas on display. She will think about what it means to hold and collect them today. She is also particularly motivated to examine buried feminist legacies within the origins of paleontology.

Alongside this, Sarah plans to materially experiment with the processes of NewspaperWood. This is where newspaper is glued together to re- form solid blocks so that it can be worked similarly to lumber. She will use Metro papers, subtracting the highest circulation print media in the United Kingdom from distribution, to produce new sculptural works that are responsive to her experiences with the Paleontology collection.

She will also connect with the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University London to better understand the history of emotions, affect, its application, and effects.

Of this opportunity, Sarah has said: “A residency at Gasworks would be significant to my development at this moment as I would have time and support to connect to significant areas of study and research that are specific to London. While I have lived in Scotland for some time, I am rarely able to visit London due to economic and time constraints. Covid 19 has made this even harder. I would also appreciate being able to share my practice and ideas within a larger NZ/UK artistic framework.”

Artist’s statement by Sarah Rose:

My overall practice uses methods of translation, abstraction, and transformation. I make work reflecting on immaterial and material processes and am interested in their interactions. I explore this through the mediums of sculpture and sound, often resulting in installations.

I am interested in what is considered ephemeral but has lasting affective and material residues and impacts. It is on the threshold of loss (of form or content) that I invite the viewer to consider the object as vulnerable, and to reflect on the practices of care. Does this work stay as it is? Should it be preserved? Does it require attention or support? Or does it shift to become something else? Exhibitions could be understood as a kind of archiving of changes, playing out as a ‘(de)composition’.

In some instances, the viewable works can be considered memories of fleeting interactions and phenomena. In the absence of a settled permanent record there is scope for information or material to recycle and mutate, decay and evolve, as it moves through bodies, imaginations, time and place. I am thinking of the works as foregrounding pluralistic and fluid narratives that consider meaning-making and the production of knowledge as interdependencies within longer timelines, relationships and in some instances, as life cycles.

My research is guided by embodied feminist materialisms, environmental practices and disability studies. Precarity is a lived reality that influences the production of the work and generates critique of. patriarchal neoliberal and late-capitalist social structures.

About the Residency for artists from Aotearoa New Zealand:

The Gasworks Residency for artists from Aotearoa New Zealand provides an artist from Aotearoa New Zealand with a full time studio at Gasworks’ Vauxhall studios and gallery complex, plus accommodation in a nearby house, shared with artists from other countries and funding to live in London for three months.

The Residency is co-organised by Jan Warburton Charitable Trust and Stephanie Post, with the support of Libby and David Richwhite and the NZ Friends of Gasworks – a small group of generous private supporters - in collaboration with Elam School of Fine Arts, the University of Auckland.