This floor-based installation won first prize in the Sustainability Art Prize 2021. It consists of large scale line drawings, ceramics, mud and field recordings of soil. The drawings are created through the repetitious addition of a continuous ink line, layer by layer it evokes the slow process of soil accumulation. The ghostly casts allude to the imprint left on the land by industrial agriculture - managed arable land is quieter and exhibits fewer different noises than organically managed land. Just a spoonful explores the relative value we attribute to materials. It is informed by interdisciplinary conversations and fieldwork, motivated by sadness for soil impacted by harvesting sugar beet in East Anglia. Despite all our achievements, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. Over the past 40 years Earth has lost a third of arable land (1) and soil is currently being destroyed 10-times faster than it’s being created (2). The global pandemic has re-focused our attention on the importance of food security, but without soil we wouldn’t have food to eat or fresh water to drink. Just one teaspoon of soil contains more living organisms than there are people on the planet but in the UK, "a spoonful of sugar depletes our soils and the NHS budget in the most delightful way" (3). By viewing soil through the lens of artistic practice I hope to raise awareness of the value of soil, to enrich our ways of thinking and our relationship to it.
(1). https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/soil-loss-climate-change-food-security-sheffield-university-1.530115 
(2). https://www.soilassociation.org/media/6263/living-soils-a-call-to-action-2015.pdf 
(3). https://feedbackglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Too-much-of-a-bad-thing-the-use-and-misuse-of-land-and-soils-to-grow-sugar-Feedback-2019.pdf

Just a spoonful, 2021

A series of ceramic vessels poised as apparatuses of quantum listening.  Thinking of sense organs as liminal spaces or crossing points, this work is inspired by the sensation of pulsatile tinnitus. Built by hand their exterior ‘skin’ is left unglazed to suggest the permeability of the body. Recently selected for Fresh 2021 at the British Ceramics BIennial in Stoke-on-Trent.

Objects listening, 2020

Ceramics, latex, wire thread, black floor level panel
30 x 50 x100 cm
Ceramic vessels caught in tightly stretched skin-like latex, dig deep into our ambiguous feelings towards the flesh. Ceramics and skin both function as containers or carriers of matter and meaning.
The taught skin-like latex represents the feeling of being physically and psychologically stretched between priorities as a studying and working mother.  Already a fully-fledged member of the ‘sandwich generation’ caring for both children and elderly parents; Covid-19 lockdown, as for many women, intensified the tension between the different forms of labour.
Transitioning between roles and realities - seemingly coherent worlds or spaces of objects and beings - I come to question the definitions of these worlds when experienced within a confined space.  In lock-down, I grieve for time spent in the interstitial – or in between – moments. Reflecting on this, the work explores the liminal state between body and object, between corporeal and non-corporeal. The notion of the skin as both a materiality and the site of relationality make it possible to describe bodies more generally outside the human and its hierarchies of difference.



Liminal vessels, 2020

An ongoing social art project this sculpture brings together a collection of found objects in acrylic boxes, exchanged by post with children and their families around the world. The contents of the boxes record a generation’s diverse personal experiences of air quality in their local environment, displayed in an indexical cabinet.
There’s a murky relationship between air pollution and coronavirus, which may mean that tackling air pollution will be a crucial part of easing lockdown. In the context of ‘shifting baseline syndrome’, I’m interested in how the next generation’s childhood experience of their environment during the pandemic might affect their ecological thinking and awareness.

Artwork details:
Title: The air we breathe  |  Artist name: Sarah Strachan  |  Media: Sculpture - Wooden cabinet, clear acrylic boxes, found objects  |  Size: W42.5 x H105 x L84cm.  |  Year: 2019 


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Sarah Strachan