Artist Statement

Socio-cultural concerns about femininity and feminism, about the body, about individual control and consumption within a consumer society forms the inspiration for the creative of my work. My work is a way of exorcising something from myself, which is very emotional, maybe troubled. I become a subject who produces that which is visible. It is my silent, non-verbal response.

The artwork plays on traditional sculptural concerns, the process of adding or taking away. However, this is not only achieved using stone or wood but adding chocolate, soap, latex, wax, degradable or even edible materials, underlining the transient state of the body. I believe food is the medium through which we, particularly women are addressed and, in turn; food can become the language of women’s response. Obsessive and routine acts of measuring, producing and perfecting envelops both my creative process and the disciplined quest for an unattainable bodily perfection. Meanwhile, the works degrade as does the body.

The final artworks attempt to present the seductive yet simultaneously repellent nature of human anatomy embodying ways of externalising a very internalised self-analysis of the body personal. The juxtaposition of hard against soft, of sensual against skeletal, of void against object, this is my visual language of a struggle within and of a body.

SARAH MISSELBROOK