Text by Xavier Jullien
For the exhibition Boolagoorda, Centre d'art Madeleine Lambert, Vénissieux, 2021

The Madeleine Lambert Art Centre presents the first institutional solo exhibition by Sarah Sandler, Boolagoorda, which means “black water” in the language of the Malgana peoples of Australia, the region’s sovereign custodians.


A site of ecological, scientific, and spiritual interest

While Boolagoorda is the title of this exhibition, it is first and foremost a remarkable coastal site of ancestral land custodianship spanning more than thirty thousand years. It is also home to the marine bacterial fossils known as stromatolites, which the Malgana consider to carry the spirits of their ancestors. These natural formations are more than 3.5 billion years old, and are a rich source of scientific information concerning the origin of complex life on Earth and also—perhaps—elsewhere in the universe. They grow patiently a few millimeters a year, their dark sculptural forms emerging through the surface of the clear water. The exhibition’s fictional film has its roots in the particularities of this landscape, the terrain around the westernmost point of Australia, and in the childhood memories of the artist.
Upon first impression, one might be struck by the airiness of the exhibition space, which could invite visitors to move freely between artworks whose detailed surfaces entice and prompt a closer look. The space’s screens are flanked by inviting soft surfaces, and one might sit down, or choose to pass from one luminous atmosphere to another.


Southern reminiscences

Several elements of the exhibition invoke memories related to place: certain fleeting sun-drenched images in the film Another is I, the model of a house as remembered by the artist, whose scale and materials might befuddle the viewer; its materials confirm it’s not a conventional architect’s model, and despite its positioning on a soft rug, it bears no aesthetic hallmarks of a dollhouse. Instead, it’s akin to a miniature maze in which the house structure becomes a mental space into which you can project yourself, where you can walk around, change scale. This creation of an “interior” mental space (as we say in common parlance) makes room for life to unfold in the secretness of intimacy.
Throughout her practice, Sandler has broken down the traditional barriers between disciplines: she has previously drawn inspiration through researching the domains of anthropology and ecology. Interplays between autofiction, science, literature, choreography, and the visual arts are particularly visible in the video Another is I, which grounds and bisects the room. The rug at the foot of the screen invites us to settle down in front of images filmed among the collections of the geology laboratory of Claude Bernard University, Lyon 1. We are accompanied by the voice of a young woman as she explores the mineral collections, moving between classification drawers, research aisles, and memories of a visit to Boolagoorda. We are privy to her inner narrative as she speculates about one’s presence in the world in relation to nature, and the impossibility of independence amongst living forms, whose secret symbiosis is largely indiscernible.
The moving image is at once beautiful, controlled, and altered by the projection canvas, which is made up of several layers—this interweaving of frames transposes a moiré effect onto the projection, whose colours, lights, and flashes oscillate between states. This dialogue between the image and the screen embodies the exhibition’s relationship to interdependence: the fabric completes the projection effect, while the image cannot become discernible without its supportive screen that nonetheless modifies it. In a way, it’s akin to the symbiotic relationship in the natural world that Boolagoorda is grounded in, an interrelated evolution of species sustaining each other.


A play on materials, shapes, and textures

The woven panel of the screen finds its negative in the rust and industrial roughness of the perforated metal sheets, which also constitute open-worked mesh partitions. These structures are a frame to which small glass forms are attached, their delicately worked details reminiscent of ritual objects or ornaments.
Several sculptural works reference the imagery and forms of stromatolites in their strata or successive deposits of matter, such as the three ceramics in the series Sisters. They were created in collaboration with a fab lab’s 3D ceramic printer, which slowly builds forms millimetre by millimetre, grain by grain, mimicking the cone of sand in the lower part of an hourglass. Through material engagements with glass, tin, and sandstone, Sandler employs numerous skills and ancient techniques such as sand and cuttlebone casting, but she also calls upon new technologies, such as the aforementioned 3D printing. The exhibition strikes a balance between oppositions and tensions, notably between natural and artificial lighting. The pile of the rugs, the rust of the metal sheets, the matte, granular minerality of the ceramics, the smooth, aqueous sheen of the glass, the soft weave of the stretched fabric, the cold sheen of the tin: the materials and surfaces of the works are an ever-present aesthetic force, interacting, hiding, and mutually influencing one another. Almost irresistibly, they call out to be touched (impossible in an exhibition space, in which we have to resist this urge!) and draw us more readily towards aspects of materiality and the body, rather than towards language and the distancing that it embodies.


Another is I¹

In these new works, Sandler explores our relationships with the living world, permeating them with doubt and mystery. She reflects on the evolutionary continuity of species and microorganisms that we are not aware of, but with which we live in symbiosis. Organic, mineral, enigmatic, Sandler’s works oscillate between scientific references and fiction, and between rationality and spirituality, without either setting them in opposition or in a hierarchy. Intuition plays a major role in her work; it’s as if an inner voice speaks to us in a language that we don’t understand, inviting us to intuit our encounters with living things differently. The disquieting experience of this encounter creates an otherness perceived as an “other self”.