SaraManser
Fresh Eyes: New Landscapes of the Moreton Bay Region, Pine Rivers Gallery, 2019.
Heading 1
LINEage,
Woolloongabba Art Gallery, Brisbane. Dec. 2018
Curios? THE ART LAB: SCIENCE IN THE STUDIO
Queensland Museum March 2017
Tracing the Subnatural: an exhibition March 2015
The sense of beauty we feel before a landscape does not come from the landscape’s aesthetic perfection.
It comes from the fact that the look of things is in perfect agreement with our instincts, our propensities,
with everything that makes up our unconscious personality …
the greater part of an aesthetic emotion is therefore produced by ourselves.
Albert Camus
The works of art produced throughout my PhD are based on my perception and aesthetic appreciation for the overlooked and unscenic aspects of nature. I have questioned ideas about what is natural and what is artificial in the nature of our cities. Through urban ecological thinking I have come to understand that cities are natural. Furthermore, I believe that by thinking differently about nature, by seeing urban nature—which is not separate from us—as a valid form of nature, we may care more for the nature on our own doorsteps.
My early interest in surface marks and stains resulted in works based in drawing and monoprinting, as a response to nature’s marks. A microscopic view of nature existing on the surfaces of human-made materials revealed other forms of nature—the subnatural—which we clean away and protect ourselves from.
The work presented here offers a different view—a layered view—of the materials, facades, spaces, and atmosphere that I recognise as being part of the city. Drafting film is used a visual barrier, a membrane diffusing a clear view of what lays beyond. Therefore, we must look closer and see differently.
My use of porcelain is not so much to do with ceramics but about a connection to Earth and natural elements that challenges ideas of permanence and change. Once fired, clay cannot be changed unlike paper which deteriorates over time.
The title of these works, “Urban Form”, is borrowed from French urbanist Henri Lefebvre (1901 – 1991) who saw nature in the urban environment as a commodity and a simulation of ‘real’ nature.
Sara Manser
Camus, Albert. (1932) 1976. “Essay on Music.” In Youthful Writings, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.
'Works of another nature'
An installation of doctoral work in progress
July 12th to 20th Project Gallery, QCA, Griffith University
My works evolve over time, like the natural processes of change and decay. The nature I am drawn to is often unseen and generally unappreciated. Not just the marginal areas of mangrove mud and shadowy forests, or the scraps of nature alongside railway lines, but also the diverse nature sprouting from the cracks in our urban environments. This is a rich source of visual stimulation.
The Still Point
Redland Art Gallery, 9 December, 2012 - 27 January, 2013
‘for we are, where we are not’
Below is an extract from the exhibition essay by Associate Professor Donal Fitzpatrick
Brisbane, June 2013
'We have been habituated to think of ourselves as contained within the body as an isolated and autonomous pocket of space. We examine the world and regulate our environment both internally and externally from this ‘body / island’ of self-sufficiency. In fact when we consider this authoritative ‘we’, we discover that the majority of the cells in our bodies are not even human, less than 10%, we exist in a much more porous relationship to our environment and play host to many other cellular life forms. (Ackerman, 2012, p.22) This new model of our being as a type of complex ecosystem has validity in reconsidering our relationship to thought and perception in the gap between the multiplicity of our being in the world and its consequent appearance to us, as our being in the world...'
'Each of the artists in this exhibition, Michelle Mansford, Lynden Stone, Sara Manser and Antonia Posada, have demonstrated a commitment to creative enquiry and research within fields of practice that are related to some or all of the questions raised above. They have constructed substantial meditations on the difficulty of identifying our ideations of ‘place’ within a perpetually challenged world of quanta, and asked how the fugitive and the seemingly invisible conspire to play upon and influence our existence within space/time and in doing so, demonstrate how the difficulties and vicissitudes of contemporary art are themselves a profound manifestation of the engagement of the active observer with the patterns, meanings and interpretations of human existence.'
Notes
Ackerman, Jennifer. 2012. ‘The Ultimate Social Network’. In Scientific American, June.
Massumi, Brian. 1987. ‘Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements’., In Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Perez de Vega, Eva. 2010. ‘Experiencing Built Space: Affect and Movement’., Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, Vol.2.
Susskind, Leonard. 2011. ‘Bad Boy of Physics’. In Scientific American, July.
Zizek, Slajov. 2004. ‘From Purification to Subtraction: Badiou and the Real’. In ‘Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy’. (ed) Peter Hallward, Continuum, London.
