As Professor Katie walk us through Sarah’s studio, I noticed the pieces of cutouts on the floor in the middle of Sarah’s studio, and the smaller canvas covered with pieces of painted panels. It is quite helpful for the viewers to see the ‘behind the scene’ process of the making of an artwork. Sarah revealed many of the unfinished works which were mainly cutout canvas in abstract shapes. There were a few unfinished square canvases covered with loose stripes, Sarah explained that to her works, the most important thing is not really about painting, it is more about the shapes, cutting and tailoring, she also showed us the industrial Juki sewing machine, it was a rather small machine in comparison to her large scale of works, which she explains that the machine was merely an auxiliary tool to her works, the key is always the composition of each shapes.
Sarah sews her panels extremely neat, in order to achieve the 60s hard-edge style painting look, all the edge in her works were very smoothly joined as well. It was interesting to know that some of the final works are actually a few times stretched size than the original size, so it kind of appears that even Sarah herself, could only grasp a close idea to what the final work may be, rather than having the work reaching to her expectation. And to artists, this kind of ‘unreliability’ of our materials, tools sometimes can create surprisingly good results, it should be something we learn and embrace.
