Sarah Sproule

Bio:

Sarah Sproule is an emerging artist and cultural worker with a BFA in Studio Arts and a BA in Art History from McMaster University.

Sarah works primarily in the casting and mould-making process, utilizing plaster, clay, and found objects to create dimensional images of abstracted bodies. Her work also explores wider ideas of otherness and the body through the lens of queerness, disability, fat politics and the intersections that exist between them. Her work has been shown internationally, and she was the recipient of the 2023 Hamilton Arts Awards - Creator Award.

As an administrator, Sarah has held positions throughout Hamilton at the Hamilton Artists Inc., McMaster School of the Arts, and The Bertrand Russell Archive and Research Centre. Sarah is currently serving as the Social Practice Coordinator at Centre[3] for Artistic + Social Practice.

Artist Statement:

Sarah Sproule is an award-winning emerging artist based out of Hamilton, Ontario. Her  work is a critical examination of queerness, disability, and the body. Her work explores the myth of permanence and our collective fear of bodies changing in time through sculpture, installation, and textiles. Through materials like plaster, ceramics and metals, she attempts to capture the fluidity of movement in permanence while juxtaposing interventions of impermanence through fragile or decomposing materials. 

These conflicting materials represent both an ephemeral and monumental body and societal desires to remain the same despite the inevitability of change.

Working primarily with found objects and the casting and mould-making process, she dismantles, breaks apart, reforms, and reimagines objects and furniture, rewriting their histories as she creates new visual stories. Often drawing on the ghost story's rich visual history and the aesthetics of horror, she is particularly interested in visualizing feelings of repression by disrupting the comfort of home and the uneasiness of not feeling safe in places of supposed sanctuary. By spotlighting the fear of queer, disabled, and fat bodies and desires to hide one’s physical and psychological differences in pursuit of perfection, her work offers an alternative to how we view our bodies. Just as ghost stories seek to terrorize and ultimately relieve viewers of their anxieties, her work aims to challenge and alleviate their fears by offering them the uneasy beauty of imperfect form.