One to Watch: Sara Clark

Multidisciplinary artist Sara Clark turns her talents to traditional materials.

The collected works of Winnipeg artist Sara Clark reveal a steady progression from synthetic materials to the organic, and from loud to quiet. First came a series of full-volume, gold-flecked resin jewellery. She later cast the resin with wood to quiet the brilliant colours before abandoning the plastic altogether and stringing geometric wood shapes from natural cotton rope. Last year, the leftover lengths led to a line of knotted wall hangings inspired by her Chinese and Scottish ancestry. “After bouncing around with resin and wood, I wanted something that wouldn’t change, just as my heritage is unchanging,” she says. “These knots existed long before I made them.” Last fall, Clark launched her most minimalist work to date: a series of capsule-shaped wood vases, sanded to a natural polish by belt and by hand to let the properties of the wood emerge, at last unobscured.

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