statement
Sarah Hardacre’s recent body of work presents a series of collages that appropriate photographs of Salford tower blocks and images cut from second hand pornographic magazines. While the subject matter of these works is, in the main, the voluptuous landscape of the female body overlaying the phallic like uprising of the modern, concrete inner city skyline; these pieces are far from being a feminist critique.
Rather, they can be viewed as a biographical fetishism of the artist, a juxtaposition of the dehumanising elements of the architectural surroundings of her home with the very human act of physical sensuality and eroticism. The themes emerging from Sarah’s collages explore various systems of control: on a local level; in the geography of the urban built environment, and on a more universal level; in the psychology of power relationships within sexuality.
Drawing on the utopian ideologies of modernist architecture, the tower block backgrounds reference the social engineering of urban regeneration and housing redevelopment schemes and the effects of such projects in constructing how public and private spaces are occupied and used. Contrastingly, the sexual and erotic content seeks to investigate a strictly individualised world of control, of fetish and fantasy, desire and deviancy, submission and domination.
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In pervious assemblage works Sarah explored the construction of knowledge and the institutional shaping of history and the natural world. Her particular interests lay in the appearance of a ‘Natural History’ and the evolution of the museum. Works emerge somewhere between sculpture and installation and often appear again, reflected in vanitas like photographic landscapes.
Appropriating the forms of arbitrary collecting and the transmutational techniques of taxidermy, each piece of work presents a rupture, a momentary disturbance; questioning the clichés of chronicle and examining the gap between rational reasoning and irrational influence.