Doubting An Untroubled Sleep 2016, Dr Sarah R Key, ink gesso acrylic on paper 110x160cms

In the first in our series of blog posts celebrating the excellent research and artistic practice being undertaken by the Fine Art Teaching Team, we share the work of Dr Sarah Key. Sarah teaches across the practice and context aspects of the second year of our Fine Art course, also contributing to the final year module ‘Reviewing, Curating and Writing on Contemporary Art.’ You can see more of Sarah’s work over on her website: https://www.sarahrkey.co.uk/

This body of work used mediated experiences of the landscape to explore approaches to drawing, using projection as a method for appropriation and compositional disruption. The unfolding events in Europe and the Syrian refugee crisis impacted on the steer of this project.

Ianus Lost, 2016, Dr Sarah R Key, ink gesso acrylic on paper 110x160cms

The aim; to use the immediacy of drawing to produce new meanings from a synthesis of existing cultural phenomena. The documentary film Patience (After Sebald)^[i] was the secondary source material used. Appropriate for its mapping of visual experiences of landscape within a discursive socio-political narrative; and a poetic reading of The Rings of Saturn^[ii] – itself a rhizomatic account of manifold socio-political ideas within a fictional construct. This methodology allowed for multiple interpretations of a specific idea to emerge, with the film being a foil to the realities of the exterior world where the critical context of the Contemporary Sublime emerges in respect of the research imperatives.^[iii]

Houston We Have A Problem, 2016, Dr Sarah R Key, ink gesso acrylic on paper 110x160cms

The ideas explored consider the desire to withdraw from the cultural world alongside the potential consequences of passivity in the wake of cultural disaster. Made manifest in the imagery there remains unfixed any singular or discernable environment, where internal and external contexts remain interchangeable.

Sailors Reading Room, 2016, Dr Sarah R Key, ink gesso acrylic on paper 110x160cms

[i] Documentary film by Grant Gee, 2012

[ii] The Rings of Saturn, W.G.Sebald, 1995

[iii] “…that cultural signs, codes and representations are understood as producing our life-world and making it meaningful. In this context the importance of the concept of the sublime for contemporary discussions on art is that it addresses an unresolved problem within this social constructionist argument. For while we may no longer believe in eternal essences or values, we often sense that our lives are fashioned by forces beyond our control, which underpin and drive acts of thinking or representation.” The Contemporary Sublime, Simon Morley, 2010, Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel Art Gallery