Baltic Centre
for Contemporary Art
Gateshead Quays
South Shore Road
+44 (0)191 478 1810
Gateshead
Level 4
Sarah Sze Tilting Planet
April 10-August 31, 2009
For nearly two decades Sarah Sze’s distinctive sculptures have riveted and challenged the viewer. Taking common disposable objects as her media, she transforms such items as water bottles, drawing pins, paper, salt, string, lamps, matchsticks and wire into delicate works that tower precariously in gravity-defying structures. These spectacular constructions can be large, complex and intricate in scale and composition, and suggest that the tiniest change in balance or temperature might incite a profound shift in their order. In Tilting Planet, the sculptures appear as though remnants from a disappeared civilisation, with each posing surreptitiously as potential mechanisms for survival: tents, rafts, lean-to shelters, escape routes.
Over time Sze has built an expansive vocabulary using everyday materials, and her precisely choreographed structures defamiliarise our preconceived ideas of these objects, lending them a newfound vitality. The sculptures seem to mould themselves into and through spaces and spread ivy-like across and up surfaces.
With a technique that is both painterly and sculptural, and with the interplay between the individual components and the overall whole, Sze explores the boundaries between art and everyday life.
The installation offers many angles of approach and can scarcely be experienced all at once or be captured in a single glance. There are many components and details to be discovered gradually as the visitor explores the sculpture. Some of these are very vulnerable and fragile, while others are more distant and unreachable.
The materials Sze uses are well known from everyday life and we recognise them from our immediate surroundings. She always acquires most of her materials from the location where the installation will be exhibited. A hammer from the United States does not look like one from Japan. She often finds what she needs in the building supply stores which are now so common. Objects she often uses in her sculptures range from matches, wool and cables to plants, fans and ladders.
She often chooses to use several thousand examples of the same object. When these everyday objects are placed close together to form entire swarms their original intended use is transformed. Their meaning and significance are changed and together they acquire a more organic affinity with each other.
The cavernous space that houses Tilting Planet at BALTIC accentuates the simultaneous macro and micro-level experiences of the sculptures. With its pillars, high ceiling and mezzanine vantage, the Level 4 gallery will inspire a new configuration of the work. Operating almost as an independent ecosystem, the sculptures that comprise Tilting Planet become a singular topographical terrain, a unique landscape emerging from components of the everyday.
Sarah Sze was born in Boston in 1969 and lives and works in New York. She studied at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut and at the School of Visual Art in New York. She has exhibited at a number of locations around the world, including the Venice Biennale in 1999, the Whitney Museum in New York in 2003, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1998.
