Sarah Blum questions the physicality of memory instigated by her explorative journey into the domestic vessels that carry a lineage with the past.

 

She began challenging the relational aesthetic between objects and memories through casting the internal and external spaces surrounding the everyday glassware.

 

Rachel Whiteread’s work has been a foremost influence in Blum’s sculptural investigation. Whiteread’s infamous ‘House’, 1993 invoked a poignant memorial to the familiar domestic form.

 

Blum attempts to challenge the existing objects, transforming them into banal abstractions of familiar entities, they transpire, establishing a new physical presence. The resulting plaster casts of the internal spaces forged repetitious traces of the objects, contesting the division between the realm of memory and experience.

 

The continued production of the internal forms of the objects provided the artist with the freedom to experiment with the casts, stacking and fusing them, establishing new shapes characterised by the domestic sphere.  The experimental fusion led to a series of enlarged plaster forms derived from the cast glass objects. The inter-play with multiplicity and scale has transformed the work and expanded it within space establishing a monumental enveloping structure.

 

The form takes precedent activating the space and distorting the physical portrayal of the fragility of the sculptures through their neutrality and minimalist contours. Blum intends to continue her investigation into the relationship between objects by confronting and questioning the role of memory, which ‘no longer represents our past to us, it acts it’[1].

 

 

 

[1] Paul, Nancy Margaret, Palmer, Scott W., Henri Bergson: Matter and Memory, Dover Publications, New York, 2004, p.93