Through her interest in the natural world, Sarah Strachan produces artwork that reflects on the salient ecological issues that our planet faces. The amount of research and conceptual thinking that underpins her work comes through into pieces that stretch across a number of mediums, a way of working that she describes as being intuitive.
We sat down with Strachan to discuss the importance of listening, her personal social responsibility and Objects Listening, an art piece that we presented in our first exhibition. Read the full interview below and be sure to check out Strachan's work in our First Tenants exhibition.
The piece you submitted us was called Objects Listening. Can you tell me a bit more about the development and inspiration for the piece?
It was actually having pulsatile tinnitus. I'll often say to somebody 'I can hear this sound' and people say 'I don't know what you're talking about'. I hear the buzz of electrical equipment, electrical chargers, electrical substations, but I hadn't seen it as a health issue. It happens through being aware of the blood pumping through your own body and it gave me this sudden awareness of my interior bodily space and the stuff that's going on inside that we just don't think about. That got me thinking, is there stuff going on inside of objects as well as people? I'm really interested in object-orientated ontology and this idea of whether or not an object is available to us. Is it just our perception, are they just available to us? That fits very much with my practice because I'm really interested in our anthropocentric view of the world and what that means for our ecological awareness and thinking. The fact that we feel separate from the world, or separate from objects, does that make us feel that we aren't part of nature and that we aren't inextricably linked with it? That's very much the opposite of my view. I have a very ecological view of the world, I think through my upbringing, being brought up in the natural world, but also through studying geography and my ever-present interest in ecology. That is very much an influence on my practise and "Objects listening" is aside from that in as far as it is a specific response to this period of pulsatile tinnitus that I had.
As soon as I looked at Objects Listening I thought of shell or rock you would find at the beach with the contrasting textures between the inside and outside. Then when I looked at some more of your work I found that nature was a consistent theme throughout. What really brings you towards looking at nature and why do you think it's so important to have that element in your work, especially in the modern-day?
It's about rediscovering. I have been working in health for the last 20 years and hadn't really drawn the dots together in terms of the link to sustainability. I thought that I had kind of lost touch with my environmental, not necessarily activism, but more my environmental tuning. I do have a sustainability manifesto as part of my practice, so I try not to waste materials, I try to find local materials to work with, I like to think about composting. I try to think about what's going to happen to the materials that I'm using. So "Objects listening" they are very in the world, they're fired clay so I can't break them down and use them as anything else, they were very much a considered make. In as far as I had to consider the materials I was using and whether it justified producing them really. More recently I've been working a lot with clay and then I don't fire it so I can just smash it and recycle it, and that fits much better with my way of practising.
This kind of social responsibility that you have within your work, do feel that's a constraint or something that really pushes you to look at the boundaries of what you create?
It does constrain me, but I think in a good way. I'm really prolific and make a lot of work, I have to be really conscious about that. One of the other things in my manifesto is to not store too much because naturally I'm a bit of a hoarder. I tend to collect materials, I see something and think about what could I use that for. Repairing is a big part of my practice and when working with clay it can be challenging sometimes. The more you push it, the more it pushes back at you. It's kind of reciprocal in that way. It's kind of a negotiation rather than anything else.
In your statement about Objects Listening there was a part we liked where you talked about the power and politics of listening, how important do you think that is in the modern world? How important do you think it is to really listen?
That was a big part of my research behind the work, I was thinking about deep listening. This sound in my ear is inaudible to me, but it's there all the time. How much of the world do we tune out or tune into as we need to? That makes me think about what we do tune into and what we tune out of in the world and how that forms our opinion. We're filtering information all the time. There's such an abundance of noise, for want of a better word, that we're trying to hear the world.
Then there is the whole other side of that which is around surveillance and it got me thinking about listening objects in as far as lots of people have in their homes now, objects that listen all the time. If you're somebody who has an "Alexa" or some other kind of device that's essentially listening out for your instructions, they're listing to your every word. I was thinking about the politics around that, in terms of freedom and intrusion.
It's interesting that you mention this "noise," when I watched the videos for Objects Listening I found it really relaxing, almost like your plugging out of that. Is that an effect you wanted the piece to have?
Yeah, there's the introduction of water which is a way of giving people an idea of the sensation of having this inner sound. When we do focus on more of our inner space then I think that's more meditative. It's this sort of self-internal reflection. The reason for the sound was really about trying to imagine what it's like underwater, and that was the nearest I could come to it. Then it got me thinking about our experience of being underwater and what it is like to be another creature underwater. I spent some time in Venice a year or two ago and it was during the flooding. I just had this whole concept of being underwater, with the rising sea levels and wondering what it was like to be another animal under water.
I spent quite a lot of time with hydrophones and trying to listen underwater, which is really part of the Objects Listening work as well. The sound is not what we hear when you put your head underwater, because that's to do with the structure of the human ear. The sound when you're underwater isn't the true sound of underwater. If you put hydrophones under the water you get a totally different sound and it's not the same experience as being in the swimming pool or in the bath. In a way, I was almost slightly disappointed by that, but then it got me thinking about what was it like to be a fish. There was a lot of thinking that came out of it in terms of the work. Because that all fits in with this idea of not having an anthropocentric view of the world and being a bit more holistic and thinking about how we all experience the world or being objects, people, animals, plants and everything else.
What's the main thing you want people to take away when they're looking at your work?
I would really like my work to disrupt people a bit, to kind of make them think 'that's a different way of looking at something,' so it's just a slight change in perception. I'm really interested in perception and in this idea that our perception is what drives the way we behave and the way we interact with the world. I want my work to be a bump in the road, something that makes you think about something in a slightly different way.
Are you optimistic for the future?
Gosh, that's a good question! I swing between optimism and a kind of terror and anxiety. I feel a lot better now because I'm making some sort of contribution to our current state in terms of being on the edge of an ecological crisis or being in an ecological crisis. I went to a lecture maybe 2 years ago, which was about climate change. It was climatologists talking about why we're in the situation we are in and I just thought, this is no different to a lecture I would have been listening to 20 years ago in university. Why are people not engaging with it? I sat there thinking the scientists haven't communicated this properly. One of the things I took away from that lecture was to do whatever you can in your area. Communication is my thing professionally and as an artist so that has got to be what I do. I feel better when I'm doing something productive or contributing in some way.