Sarah Goffman: Christopher Chapman

Sarah Goffman: XXXXXXXL -Front Room, Sydney, December 2002 In June I met Sarah at Ruth's party. It was an Australiana theme and Sarah was dressed as a swaggy. At that time, Block gallery was across the road from Ruth's place, and Jason and Oscar took me over there to see Sarah's show. I got to see it twice because, later, we went there again to find a stash of beer. This night-time viewing has remained with me because Sarah often uses coloured lights in her installations, and the effect was striking in a modest and poetic way. Here, there were rotating gels, so that things were bathed in shifting hues. This added to the floaty, underwater feel of the work: plastic bags like ghosts, a strange wading pool full of floating cigarette lighters, an inverted clear-plastic umbrella containing a variety of found rings (jewelry), and other collections of things... At Artspace as a part of the Lempriere prize exhibition, Sarah's work was more hermetic but equally atomised, this time using the natural light and structure of a gallery window (at least that's what I remember). What struck me initially about the work at Block was how so many kinds of different vectors were overlaid and how the thing seemed like a diagram or schizoid map. There were connections between objects and materials because of their materiality (plastic, water, light), and networks of formal associations. And what made this stranger was the social connections that many of these things carried: their individual histories, their previous and on-going changing uses. At Block, this happened too. Collections of stuff (found and made, like the clock faces); things whose use values were stretched (big pants / curtains); and the use of lights and transparent materials to set up a supremely evocative atmosphere. Here there was living plant matter too: branches in vessels of water, some long lengths of branch under-lit by a strip of white LED, and outside the door in the hallway, a potted shrub behind a leaning sheet of glass. Within the installation as an overall thing were micro-narratives: a little box with a photo and some wire, and collections of images and objects grouped according to unknown formulas. The thing smelled nice because of honey incense and a smelly advertisement for Majora perfume torn from a magazine and taped to the wall. Spookily, inside water-filled bags and vessels were plastic skeletons, and strange-looking clumps of waxed wool. These elements, and the central placement of a sheet of glass on trestle legs, under-lit, gave this work the sense of some kind of laboratory, or hot-house, moreso than the other two I had seen. As it got darker the subtleties of the lighting began to transform and enhance elements of the work. After the opening was a party, and late at night, the installation, and the experience of being inside it, became stranger and more mesmerising. Chris Chapman