Earth Beneath Her Feet by Sarah Needham
Hive Curates are pleased to curate a solo exhibition of Sarah Needham’s work, including the travelling installation ‘100 Names’, new work from the ‘Earth Beneath Her Feet’ collection, and an earth pigment workshop, which will be open for the public at Broadworks.
Evoking a sense of space with colour and tone, Sarah Needham makes work in collections. Each collection has a research base in the way pigments leave a trace across geography and time of our human interconnection and interactions. For each work there is a metaphoric relationship between the way the paint is laid on the surface, and the actual pigments that have been found, and the central meaning that is being explored. Prompted by events in the present Sarah seeks out historical events or places that echo the human condition.
We asked Sarah a few questions about her practice and motivations, so have a read and join us for the Private View on 1st August to meet the artist herself.
How did you get into your creative practice?
I guess my first fundamental art experience (that went beyond a simple interest and sensual delight) was when I was 18 and came up to visit Tate as part of our A Levels. The Seagram murals in the Rothko room hit me in the solar plexus; I had recently had my first experience of death. I suddenly understood what art could do and wanted to be a part of that.
I graduated in 1989 and even then, I was interested in exploring the ways people connect across culture, geography and time, and are part of a whole, but the breakthrough to my current way of working came much later, around 2016. Sometimes the obvious hits you in the face - I had a realisation of the nature of pigment as material, as a traceable and tradable substance. Before then, I had just thought about it as colour with particular qualities, but I understood that it was material itself, and it was a material that carried traces of human interaction, of culture and cultural exchange, and that all of it comes from the earth, as even the synthetic ones are synthesised from materials already in existence on or in the earth.
By 2016, I already had a daily studio practice, but this transformation of understanding led to a much more thorough research base for my work. A provocation would lead to a period of research accompanied by researching the pigments that arose as materials in social, historical or site specific research, and gradually adding them to my studio practice. As I find pigments in the research, they are experimented with in the studio, and their material nature, the properties specific to that pigment are found, and then I start making the paintings. The seeds for the next collection are usually planted as the previous collection is coming to an end, and so it continues.
I was also lucky enough to have a geologist amongst my friends, who took me walking in Scotland to show me how to recognise ochres and umbers in the landscape. I set about finding out how to turn earth into pigment and this became important when I was working on pieces that had a particular relationship to location, but also increasingly important in general.
What are your big inspirations - how do these reflect in your current body of work and this exhibition?
I am provoked rather than inspired! I work to try to better understand the world I live in, both the beautiful and the ugly, and the connections between the contemporary and the past. This series of work was provoked by the ugly narratives coming out of government about refugees and asylum seekers. I wanted to look for another period in time where the government was actively involved in this kind of dehumanising discourse (I had quite a lot to choose from,) and the witch panics of the 15-1600s were a good fit.
The economic research I did into this period led me to the contemporaneous dyes, the importance of agriculture to the earth pigments, the beginnings of international trade in the early modern era and therefore also to the use of pitch from shipbuilding. I wanted a material that was both specific, digging earths from the villages where people were accused and where they lived before the accusations were made, and also universal - red ochre is the colour of blood. Haemoglobin and red ochre share the same chemistry being coloured by iron oxide.
The forms in the work have their inspiration in ideas of spread, infection and fertility. I had the material in the form of pigments: the earth they would have walked on, powdered brick that crumbled into the streets from houses that are still here and still losing bricks or tiles, the material they would have held in their hands in their daily lives, and the dyes that are in the clothes that the women came from. This is the nearest I can get to them after 500 years, the nearest to touching them, just one step away, touching the same things they would have touched.
What are you hoping to share through this exhibition? What would you like people to take away from your work?
I would like people to have an aesthetic and sensual experience of connection, as well as an understanding of how and why the work was made, I will have wall text and a digital catalogue for that purpose. I would like people to remember the people who were accused of witchcraft, largely women, and make connections from that to the present day.
I hope that there are people who fall in love with some pieces and want to take them home and live with them long term, and I hope to generate sponsorship for a travelling exhibition of the 100 Names installation. This consists of 100 small pieces on a frame, each painting made with materials from a specific village on the front, and with an opening at the back which gives the names of an accused person and the village they came from.
Photograph by Dani Tagen
What are you excited about going forward?
I am excited about the prospect of taking the installation piece The 100 Names back to the villages and towns across England where the named women were accused, as an act of remembrance to them.
The most exciting upcoming development for me personally is that I am starting an MA in Painting at the Royal college of Art in September. I am looking forward to an intense year of evolving my practice in a critical context.
We are excited to share Sarah’s powerful work with our audiences and invite you to join us for the Private view of the exhibition on 1st August.
To link to the exhibition, there will also be a public facing earth-to-pigment workshop on Friday 6th September.
Private View: 1st August, 5 - 9pm
Exhibition running: 30th July - 11th August
Opening times: Tues - Fri, 8am - 6pm (other times at request)
