Damaris Athene: Could you start off by telling me a bit about yourself?

Sarah Larby: Yeah, I'm from Northumberland which is north of Newcastle. I grew up there, went to uni at Leeds, studied Fine Art with cultural theory, rather than art history. I did a couple of art history modules, but I was mainly looking at film and television. I did a year abroad studying classical sculpture in Warsaw, Poland, which was really interesting. That was all figurative based, working from a live life model to do sculptures. We did metal work, bronze, aluminium, stone carving, and a massive life-sized clay sculpture of a life model that was then cast in ceramic plaster.

DA: Wow!

SL: That took the full year! I came back from Poland and had my final year, which ended in the pandemic. I had about two/three months of working from home before graduating and then moving back to Leeds. I’m now got a studio at Assembly House, which is an artist-run studio complex. In terms of my art, I started out doing painting, then digital and installation and then back to painting and sculpture.

DA: Where are you with your practice now?

SL: I've stuck with sculpture. It's where I want to be. I just tried a little bit of everything at uni, really. I find sculpture a lot more like freeing. I got a bit obsessive with painting. I mainly work with casting materials, or materials that have a transition period between two states of matter, like between fluid and solid, for example foams or plasters. I try to let the material guide the process of making the work and look at how much I can control the process. Specifically, how much do I need to control it to make something interesting? Because you can just let material do what it wants to do and it turns out shit.

DA: *laughs* Yes!

SL: I've always been interested in working between boundaries. Whether that’s between fluid and solid, something looking slightly bodily that also isn't bodily, or control and chance. The boundaries between supposed binary opposites. I like seeing how far you can push something.

DA: It must be such a fun process of experimentation! Could you expand upon how material exploration guides your work?

SL: It started with looking at minimalism at uni. I started to move towards that and researched into how those artists worked. One thing that I was always struggling with was knowing what to make. Being led by the material itself meant that I didn’t need to have an idea, the idea is the material itself. Normally I'll mix the material, whether it's plaster or something, see what it's like in its fluid state, see what it's like in its solid state. If I put it in a balloon, what does it do? If I put it in a pair of tights, or I make a shape, that kind of thing, and then I see what quality I find interesting. When I started working with plaster, what I found really interesting was the shape of the curves that it made. When it reacted with gravity, when you're hanging it, it's such an organic shape that you can't really replicate by carving something or sculpting something. So I was like, Okay, what could I make that exploits that? That curve is almost bodily, so maybe I'll accentuate that a little bit. Then I'd look at maybe building a structure, or using string or using a found object to control the material to get the outcome I want.

DA: How do you explore colour within your work?

SL: Colour has been a weird one. I have my ups and downs with it. I either go through periods of time where I use a lot of colour and periods of time where I go really monochromatic. I think colour is such a difficult one because it has so many connotations. As soon as you mix colour in plaster it goes really pale, which can have connotations with the girly and bodily and you’ve got to be careful if that’s not the kind of connotation you want. I’m trying to be a bit more conscious about what that colour is going to say about the object. Unlike a painting of a person, with my work you're looking at the material properties so the colour and texture become more important. At the minute, I'm doing something in black silicone. So then I've got to be aware that it can look like bin bags and may have sexual undertones because it's like black vinyl. I've done it before when something's been really colourful and it’s been because I’ve been in a good mood and just enjoying making something. Colour can also have connotations of emotion and playfulness as well, which is something that I really want to bring into my work.

Tipping Point, 2021, Plaster, pigment, wood & gravity, 100cm x 40cm x 20cm
Photo courtesy of the artist

DA: Your work that really stands in my mind is the one with pastel plaster blobs that are placed on top of each other leaning against a wall. They look like they might be about to fall down and there’s tension within the piece that contrasts with the sickly sweet associations of the colours. Could you expand upon the control, chance, and tension that you have in your work?

SL: I don't really know where that came in, I think it’s just something that intrigues me. When I started to work in sculpture I was letting myself play with the material. With that freedom comes loads of mistakes and creating unexpected things a lot of the time. Something that almost makes you look twice, like, how has someone done that?

DA: I find it so much more intriguing if there’s that pull of wondering how something is made. It invites you for a closer look.

SL: You can interpret tension in a lot of ways. A lot of people would say that it can be a manifestation of anxieties and tensions you feel in your own life, because, subconsciously, a lot of things go into your art pieces. The works that had that kind of tension were made in my final year at uni during the pandemic. Recently there’s been less tension in my work.

DA: What are you making at the moment?

SL: I'm making a lot of pillars.

DA: That feels quite different than your other work that has, in my view, a strong relationship with the body.

SL: Well, I kind of see these pillared pieces as people. I'm trying to make them relative to someone's body size. They're piles of plaster on top of each other and they're still quite bodily. But I think it all comes from circumstance as well. When I had a smaller studio space I had to work off the walls, whereas now I've got more floor space.

DA: Yeah, studio space affects your work so much! How do you usually work and how has that been affected by the pandemic?

SL: Well, I guess the main thing is not necessarily because of the pandemic but I had to get a job. Now I can only make art in the evenings or on the weekends. During the pandemic, I did a little bit of work on the sewing machine and I was working outside more. What was interesting about the end of my university degree was seeing all my sculptures outside. It was very different to working in a studio environment and having a white cube. I saw everything with grass and trees. I made a piece where I needle felted wool over this expanding foam shape, and then I left it out in the garden. A couple of weeks later, the birds had taken all of the felt out for their nests! One of my pieces I called ‘The Wall’. I built a wooden frame so that I had something I could hang my sculptures off of and then it became part of the piece. Pigeons kept sitting on top of it, so then I put all these rusty nails on the top so the pigeons didn't sit on it and then I called it ‘The Wall (Pigeon Proofed)’. I quite enjoyed it actually, getting wrapped up and going outside to work.

DA: It must be a very different experience working inside again! What would you like people to get from your work?

SL: I think that's why I like exhibitions so much, as I never really know what people are going to get from it. I like seeing what people's interpretations of things are. Quite a lot of the time I make my sculptures on the edge of looking like something that you see in real life. So quite a lot of people will try and make sense of them because they’re semi abstract. Everyone always thinks it reminds them of something different, which is always really interesting. I’m interested in that element of curiosity, if someone is figuring out how something is made.

DA: Have you had any surprising or memorable reactions to your work?

SL: Yeah, when I moved from painting into sculpture I made lots of face casts and stored them all shoe boxes in my university bedroom. The house got burgled and I came upstairs to my room to find all of these shoe boxes open on my bed. I would love to see that person's reaction. You're like, oh my god, we're in the house of a psycho!

DA: *laughs*

Jolene (from if these walls could talk), 2021, Silicone, pigments, resin & found object, 22cm x 24.5cm x 3cm
Photo courtesy of the artist

SL: I also made some silicone bean bag heads, that’s the only way I can really describe them! They probably had the strongest reaction out of everything I’ve made. Some people thought they were hilarious and some people were so freaked out. It was polar opposites. I did an exhibition with them where I let people touch them and interact with them which resulted in loads of people punching them. I would never have expected that. That was probably one of the strangest reactions. Another thing is that a lot of my art tutors would be like, Oh, that's quite phallic, isn't it? I was like, I don't really know what you mean. It’s my auntie’s favourite thing to say, I don't really get it, but it's all a bit sexual isn't it? Like, not to me, but okay. That's what's going on inside your brain auntie, not mine!

DA: Everyone puts their stuff on it! Whose work inspires you?

SL: Eva Hesse is a big one. I really love Phyllida Barlow as well. Holly Henry too. And then, Katharina Fitz, she was in New Contemporaries. She plays with casting stuff, which is really interesting. I've got so many. I've got Jean Arp there as well. He made organic shapes, very simple sculptures.

DA: Oh I haven’t come across him.

SL: I think you'd like his work. The shapes are similar to your paintings. He was a stone carver mainly.

DA: I’ll have to look him up, thank you! What projects have you been working on recently?

SL: Recently, I've been spending a lot of time figuring out what I want to make after uni. Now you don't have anyone telling you what to do, or what gets you a good mark. I had an exhibition in Newcastle after graduating, which was really good, and then I had a couple of online things, a couple of little bits here and there around Leeds. Now I'm planning my own show with a couple of friends from university. We're going to curate it ourselves at Assembly House, which will be nice because you get more of a hand in how things are displayed.

DA: When are you planning it for?

SL: It's going to be from the 17th to the 19th of December, just three days.

DA: What plans you have for future work. What are you going to make for that show?

SL: Actually, I think I'm going to finish some of the pillar-esque pieces. I want them to act as things for people to walk around, dividing the space, like walking through a crowd. But that depends on how many I can make. I really like it when people can get close to artworks as well. I’ve also been working on a series of what I call ‘skin pieces’. They’re more towards the bodily. They’re paintings, almost, in old charity shop frames. I think might display them for the first time. I'm trying to think how to pull different things together and deciding if I want all the pieces to relate to each other or if I want to have them as separate things.

DA: I'm excited to see what you make.

SL: Me too! *laughs*

DA: Thank you so much for sharing your practice with me Sarah.

SL: Thank you!