Sarah Tomasetti's PhD completion viewing at SITE EIGHT Gallery

Sarah Tomasetti
Mnemonic Mountain 
PhD Completion viewing 

In seeking a reinvigorated engagement with landscape, this practice-led PhD research project examines how the agency and liveliness of the matter of fresco making, beginning with the breathing of the ancient lime cycle and tracing each material from its origin in the formation of the earth, can be employed to generate new approaches to studio practice. The inquiry puts these in conversation with cultural narratives that inflect the ways humans imagine, traverse, worship and destroy mountainous regions. Through close attention to the properties of matter and quiet contrasts in atmosphere, tone and texture, the research examines how material form can respond to those frequencies in the world that resonate just below the level of the conscious mind. In reviving pre-modern techniques and materials that require the slow sensing of moisture, temperature and molecular interaction, Mnemonic Mountain reveals a correspondence and entanglement with the living world through making. Tracing the origins of five matter-substances — stone, cloth, grit, wax and water — the research is an exploration of rupture and divergence in search of new forms that inhabit a fluid space between sculpture and painting, speaking to the overlapping temporalities of human imagining and the material world. 

Opening Viewing: 
5pm–7pm Thursday 23 February

Additional Viewing:
12pm–4pm Thursday 23 February

Image: Sarah Tomasetti, Grit Surge 2021–2023 (detail), lime putty and marble dust on encaustic surface (Photo: Emma Byrnes)