Sara Grisewood

The focus of my work has been a brownfield site in Lewes, in East Sussex which holds  traces and legacies of past industries and activities - an Ironworks and ,more recently, smaller businesses, including a bus garage, a soap factory, timber yard,  car wash, and various creative studios, charity furniture store, and a skateboard park. My research includes the various histories of the site, and  the social and economic implications of the cycle of demolition, rebuilding and gentrification. I am interested in the physical  experience being within the abandoned  empty spaces which hold a sense of aftermath and loss; away from everyday sounds and activities where one is not always sure of the exact nature of the debris or decomposed matter underfoot.  My interest currently is with the materials found in these places and what happens to them over time as they degenerate and become messy. The thriftiness of using recycled materials appeals to me as do other restrictions or parameters, such as weight, and size, together with concepts of ephemerality and duration. Because this work is centred in one place, I have been investigating meanings of space and place, in relation to Land art since the 1960s which was pushing the limits of how art can operate outside a gallery. Current art works relating to landscape and the environment today are different to the more monumental Land art of the 60s and 70s , work  that has become more light weight, with a lighter footprint, more aware of its environment, human and non-human, maybe even portable, and transient. My sister died recently and my wanderings and intense focus on scraps of found objects, has become, in part, a process of grief. I visit the site often, wandering and following the same paths, drawing, taking prints, photographing, and collecting. This has led me to look at artists and writers who have used walking as part of their practice, and also artists who create a kind of field work, cataloguing their finds, such as  Lara Almacegui and her documentation of wastegrounds.  

 

Any actual colour, paint or collage, I use refers to gestures, marks, or  plants  found on the site - graffiti on fragments of breeze block,  marks of a glue spreader on the back of an old vinyl tile, a yellow  dye made from prolific buddleia flowers, and distinctive blues and reds of street safety signs, hoarding etc. Pieces of work might include several different materials, and the juxtaposition of the unlikely materials references the messiness and disorder of these hybrid, abandoned spaces. Along with looking at the assemblages of Phyllida Barlow and  the collages and paintings of Prunella Clough, I am referencing artists who use lighter, more fugitive materials, such as Do hoh Suh's translucent, ephemeral,  architecture of home, and the more hands on  feel of his rubbings. Also, certain film makers  that echo themes of loss, and a sense of place, especially Tacita Dean. The process has involved working out how to use combinations of found objects and simple, haptic techniques such as papier mache, cement casting, collage and assemblage,  incorporating sewn textiles, combined with techniques of taking  prints/rubbings  at the site, to demonstrate the oozing and soft quality of these abandoned spaces. This now evolves into finding ways to create light, portable pieces, to hold and display an archive of  traces and  remnants from the site. I look to artists who use materials which might be associated with other places and other situations : building site supplies, rubbish, cheap diy materials, domestic materials from the home  – artists such as Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Carol Rama, Michelle Stuart, Merle Ukeleles, and Heidi Buchel.