Sarah Tomasetti’s practice is grounded in the revival of pre-modern techniques and materials such as fresco and encaustic that require the slow sensing of moisture, temperature, and molecular interaction. Her doctoral research put the agency and liveliness of fresco-making into conversation with how cultural narratives inflect the ways humans imagine, traverse, worship and destroy mountainous regions. The ‘stone-skin’ made on the wall and detached, can be both a substrate for painting and a fluid sculptural form. Sarah's work is held in public and private collections in Australia and internationally and she is a lecturer in painting at RMIT University.
Artist Statement
For me anxiety is often about trying to reconcile two or more contradictory states, and art practice can create a third space, in which it becomes possible to dwell with what seemed previously irreconcilable. I began making the wayfinding arrows whilst on residency in a mountain location with no paths and several precipitous drops, as a way of navigating the strangeness of a new landscape through a material connection to the ground. Out walking, I placed them in patches of snow, along frozen tarns and gullies, a small visual intervention to grow familiarity with the topography through slow looking. Each stain is drawn from the colour of the sky, stone, or vegetation recorded at different times of the day and night. The various sizes recede, echoing the elastic nature of distance in the mountains or the movement of wind barbs on a meteorological chart.
The wayfinding arrows make visible the effort of navigating terrain as a metaphor for finding one’s way through uncharted territory of all kinds. The anxiety about getting lost, finding one’s way, merges with the ever-present anxiety that can drive art practice, the finding of form to house subconscious drives and the tension between different points in time and states of being. The rhythmic making of the arrows created a relationship between the present, my childhood visiting Switzerland, and a deeper ancestral past, in which my forebears created frescoed wayfaring shrines along high-altitude paths, where offerings could be made to ensure safe passage.
“I am indebted to the Kenneth Myer Artist Residency at the Whare Kea Chalet in New Zealand for a rare opportunity to spend two weeks observing the weather and light in a remote mountain location.”
