SARAH SANDS PHILLIPS

Sarah Sands Phillips has a multidisciplinary, exploratory practice. Her work addresses materiality and expresses formalist concerns regarding visual organization and design. Investigating ideas around beauty and decay, she is interested in reincarnating objects, working through the inherent restrictions and limitations of found materials and detritus to unveil renewed forms.

Her works show signs of their physical labour and exude a sense of time through a process of layering and erasure. Raised playing classical piano, these personal memories point to an interest in the musicality of painting, and help explain moments of repetition and rhythm in her work.

In her paintings, drawings and sculptures she often sands away the surface, aging elements of the object in a cyclical process of addition and removal. By layering surfaces, the paintings become veiled, allowing multiple entry points into the image. In many ways these physical processes addresses the shifting and fading quality of memory, as well as its connection to the body.

Sarah Sands Phillips completed a BFAH at Queen's University, Kingston, majoring in studio art and art history. Working primarily in painting and printmaking, and peripherally in film, sculpture, and poetry, she investigates a variety of mediums and modes of image making as a deliberate strategy in understanding form. Recent exhibitions include History of Desire at Katharine Mulherin’s satellite space NO Foundation in Toronto, and Tone It Down at PDA Projects in Ottawa. Sarah is the recipient of an Ontario Arts Council Emerging Artist Grant (2013) and a Toronto Arts Council Emerging Artist Grant (2014).

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