Sarah Tew

My practice has recently made a closer focus on the process of painting; with a consciousness of space, body and material, with a continuous exploration into the operation of Formless, but with a distance also developing through the process of analysis in the work. Through documentation and a visualisation of numerous performances and of regular studio experimentations and activities, the messy nature of my practice has been captured and reformulated into the clean plane of the photograph, posing questions concerning the nature of performance and capturing the moment, the value of different images and the nature in which work can be looked at.

Through a visualisation of practice attention is drawn to the importance of the process, trying to highlight the moment of painting through its aftermath. Key motivations within my work when painting and photographing have been to comprehend the body in relation to medium and space in relation to the task of formlessness.
With a curiosity to unfold the formal connotations of the horizontal and vertical, reinstating the term horizontality to define the quality or task of being horizontal. This stance branches out from its origins from George Bataille and questions the use-value of Rosalind Krauss’s re-evaluation of formless in 20th Century art practices.