Sarah Wright @ Glasgow Print Studio

Sarah Wright expands into installation and sculpture in her latest exhibition in Glasgow Print Studio. Using methods of stripping away and simplification, she paradoxically sets up a disquieting ambiguity.

Review by Adam Benmakhlouf | 06 Apr 2016

Sarah Wright makes it difficult to skip ahead in Fresh Starts. Installed in Glasgow Print Studio’s spacious gallery, translucent curtains are made to divide the space. Most of the printed works and found material work doesn’t veer too far from A4. They’re only fully intelligible once approached, so the new body of work can’t be taken in with a single glance around, and so it is that movement, sequencing and groupings are brought into play. 

Getting closer, the images are of fashion photography and off-kilter takes on the selfie, and include see-through plastic sleeves of found haberdashery items – elastic underwire, hooks, zippers.

Starting off, there’s a repeated close-up cosmetic ad portrait, rotated 90 degrees. All feeling too close already, the overlaying of one-to-one scale flatbed scanned images of metal hoops make for a pressed-up picture plane.

The one-to-one representations and slight enlargements of magazine pictures keep all the cropped images back and make-up palettes no further than arms' length. There’s an intimate scrutiny, and the feeling of an enquiry into representation that’s out to collapse separative distance.

To this end, perspective and depth are complicatedly shrunken with embossment, and one-colour etching-type prints that make a kind of compressed figure-of-eight shape into a scattered motif. Then it appears as a little fastener (according to the list of works) in a plastic bag across the room. It doesn’t become any more self-explanatory as it slips from image to object.

Laying out only so many originals, copies, objects and embossments, there’s a deliberate reducing of elements and parts. But any demystifying or simplification only brings to the surface a further ambiguity – all the more complicated in plain sight.


Sarah Wright, Fresh Starts, Glasgow Print Studio, run ended