23.05 - 10.07.2021
Sara Bjarland
Works
Biography
Materials are at the center of Sara Bjarland’s practice, more specifically so called “post-consumer materials”, also called waste. For her sculptures, installations and photographs, she collects discarded objects and materials at trash piles on the street and from recycling centers. In doing so she materially thinks through and reflects on the world around her and the legacy that current generations are leaving on the planet. Bjarland sees her practice as a way of recycling, caring for and preserving these materials.
Her making process is highly intuitive and she lets herself be guided by the objects and materials she encounters, considering their sculptural, material and aesthetic qualities. She is interested in transforming the materials and allowing their history and the associations that arise from them, to contribute to a new life as an art object. Sometimes appropriating or altering the objects, sometimes casting them into materials like ceramic or bronze, she tries to extract new meanings or suggest new possibilities, for example by imagining them as future archeological remnants (like her ceramic casts of broken car tyres). An old umbrella reminiscent of an animal skin, sun blinds collapsing into piles like dead palm trees, a shrivelled cactus resembling a dead animal – Bjarland is interested in the grey area where the domains of object and organism, the made and the born, are blending and blurring, and lifeless matter seems to spring to life, only to start fading again.
Sara Bjarland (°1981 Helsinki) is a Finnish-born artist based in Amsterdam since 2007. She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London and in 2012-2013 she was a participant at HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts) in Ghent. Her work has been shown in several countries across Europe, and recent exhibitions include Pergola at Galerie M29, Cologne (2024), Cultiver, Sculpter, Végeter at Botanique, Brussels (2024), Paltz Biënnale, Soest (2024), Craft!Now at CODA Museum, Apeldoorn (2023), Trance, at Tallinn Art Hall (2023). In 2024 she was commissioned to make a public, permanent sculpture as part of the Beaufort Triennial, curated by Els Wuyts. The work, Monobloc Moments, is situated in De Haan/Wenduine.
Bjarland’s work is part of several public and private collections, including the Kiasma Museum for Contemporary Art (Helsinki); The Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation (Helsinki); Museum de Fundatie (Zwolle); Artis collection (Amsterdam); Thomas Kuhmann collection (Hamburg) and Frédéric de Goldschmidt Collection (Brussels).
2012-2013
Higher Institute for Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium
2005-2007
MFA Fine Art (Media), The Slade School of Fine Art, London
2001-2004
BA (Hons) Photography, Kent Institute of Art and Design, Rochester
