Post-Grad Portraits: Sarah Craske
- Written byPost-Grad Community
- Published date 07 February 2024
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A series of interviews with alumni from across UAL, Post-Grad Portraits is a chance to highlight the achievements of postgrads from the last decade. Post-Grad Portraits is part of our celebration of Post-Grad Community's 10 year anniversary.
Sarah Craske
MA Art and Science, Central Saint Martins, 2016
Hello Sarah! Could you introduce yourself?
Hi, I'm Sarah and I graduated in 2016 from the MA Art and Science course at Central Saint Martins.
Tell us about what you do now.
My practice operates in the liminal spaces between knowledge constructions, connecting ideas from science, technology, history, religion, magic and philosophy. It takes the form of research, multi-media interventions and installations, writing and activism.
My work is site-specific, connecting with its context as much as possible to reveal hidden ecologies, connectedness and commonality. I partner with places of history, knowledge or narrative including libraries, museums and laboratories, using their rich contexts to provide materials and to become a structural part of the work.
My artistic practice continues to evolve in response to my continuing acknowledgement that violent colonial and industrial capitalism has damaged our planet’s natural systems. We are in an existential crisis; the earth’s biosphere is collapsing. However, the epoch we live in offers a rare opportunity: the problem that faces us is so huge and so terrible that it is unifying people from wildly different disciplines in their desire for change.
A more-than-human approach embraces this coming together of different disciplines and resists disciplinarity. As someone who aspires to becoming more-than-human, collaborative transdisciplinarity underpins my practice.
I have lived for 20yrs at the mouth of the Thames Estuary (UK) where rising sea levels are predicted to have a severe impact. The Estuary is an area of social and economic deprivation, something I experience first-hand, and these structural inequalities will make it harder for local communities to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate breakdown.
Inhabiting this context, I have been developing a body of work – An Eco-Hauntology – and have started developing a regenerative practice model with the hope I learn how to re-entangle myself with the biosphere, making me indigenous to an ecologically interconnected, more-than-human world in which it’s possible to thrive.
This work has been made possible by a Jerwood Arts Award, an artist attachment with Cement Fields and an Arts Council Award. I have been working towards another site specific collaboration, which is hugely exciting and I can reveal later this year …
What's your proudest moment?
Pride is not necessarily a word I align myself with.
I get most satisfaction when I am able to embody slow, mindful, deep research work, both on and off line, where I can be ‘in flow’ through my thoughts, ideas and work. It is in this space that I am my most creative, productive and happy.
When I am able to be in this space, it feels like an act of resistance to capitalism and I am quietly pleased I have achieved it, midst a world that demands multitudinous engagement and consumption across multiple online platforms.
Over time, I have felt my neurological pathways alter at the detriment to my authentic, creative self and have been working out how to maintain and benefit from these platforms, without compromising depth of practice and embodied learning, and suffering from mental health decline.
My work and practice is never complete – they feel more like living entities that are constantly growing or evolving, so in that sense rarely do I draw a line under something to then be able to step back and reflect on, as if it is ‘finished’.
Participating in the Masters Programme at UAL was incredibly challenging for me. It was at a time when I was also having to work to support my attendance, my partner was extremely ill and we were living in relatively derelict accommodation.
Many students have much to manage during their studies, and for some, including me, just being able to turn up at the studio was achievement enough. To then receive the Mullen Lowe NOVA Award was both a surprise and something that I think comes close to feeling pride, or achievement. I had managed to complete the study, and in others’ eyes I had done this in a meaningful and impactful way.
What’s your biggest strength and weakness?
I am trying to grow from this binary and hierarchical way of thinking, and embody the non-hierarchical, multi-networked and entangled life we actually all inhabit. I would suggest that everything has a reason for being and is integral to our environment. What is a ‘strength’? If you unpack this word, it is hugely problematic, with it being implicit that ‘strength’ itself is ‘better’.
If we have any chance in truly regenerating the planet we all rely on for our own survival, then the sooner we move away from the patriarchal and capitalist patterns of thought, the better. We need to desperately engage with and think about our world differently.
What's the most significant learning experience you've had?
Since my Jerwood Artist Attachment with Cement Fields, I have been working with climate science in my work – and for a particular collaborative project, we researched the impact climate change was going to have specifically on the area that I was living in.
Among the many more general issues, such as the UK currently experiencing collapse of biodiversity, increased rainfall, temperature, storms, flooding etc – the research team discovered that the beaches, which are one of the few natural spaces left in the area, will disappear at the latest by 2070, but more likely by 2050.
We also learnt (though were previously mindful) that no proper mitigation or adaption was being put in place by local authorities, to support a very densely populated area. It is also not their responsibility to do so. Without a proper response the area will suffer deepening floods, infrastructure breakdown, energy scarcity and sewage back-up.
This is going to come sooner than we think. It is one thing to look at the data, and make work in response to it. It is another to actually embody the data, realise its implications directly to yourself as an interconnected human within our planet, and take difficult action. Spending time on this work and facing the inconvenient truth, is one of the catalysts to transforming my practice.
I am still processing another significant learning experience which began when I was awarded an international residency to work in a synthetic biology laboratory at ETH Zurich. This led to creating my own synthetic pieces of biology and consequently a body of work that continues to unpack our relationship with disease; but it also led to a 2 year project collaborating with a historian of science, recreating an ancient cure-all Theriaca.
I began the research from a position that Western science is a knowledge system of truths, but the reconstructing and re-enacting of historic knowledge has shown me that contemporary Western science is situated, constructed by humans in cultures that shape their understanding of their findings. In fact, by following the scientific method, we have lost knowledge from the past, from a time where we were much more connected and entangled in our environment.
This has transformed my practice; I have since widened my interests to explore other truth making traditions designed to understand and explain the world.
What's your favourite artwork?
The relationship between art and your lived experience means that there will never be a favourite work; as you continually transform, different works will be differently meaningful at different times.
Artworks that stay with me are those that have enabled awe, through the expansiveness of their idea or intention. Recent scientific studies in awe have revealed the positive complex emotional responses we experience when subject to it, from a reduction in stress, through to improved social cohesion. Nature and art continue to be vehicles to this experience, art having being used for 1000s of years, in prehistoric caves, sites of religion and power.
An early example of this for me is when I saw Cold Dark Matter, by Cornelia Parker for the first time at the Tate Modern, in about 1995. It overwhelmed me, as I sat on the floor surrounded by a moment of expanded time. Since then, works such as Katie Patterson’s Future Library, or Semiconductor’s Halo which is an immersive installation that enables you to “inhabit the results of particle collisions, produced by experiments taking place at CERN” reside in me as awe experiences.
Now I am seeking artwork that not only inspires awe, but has regenerative, activist and interventionist qualities – or that are examples of entanglement. I recently heard a recording of Babenzélé women in The Central African Republic, gathering mushrooms. The beauty of the entangled soundscape was both mesmerizing and awe inspiring.
Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
I hope to have an established ‘entanglement practice’ that is helping regenerate our biosphere, whilst having built successfully on my existing career.
Facing the climate crises can be pretty exhausting and extremely stressful, therefore I am just beginning the process of establishing a foundation to support other creatives working in this area and hope that in 10 years’ time, this is flourishing.
Where can people find out more about your work?
I am currently rebuilding my website, to ensure that it has a low digital carbon footprint. However soon, you will be able to find out more about my work here:
Related Links
- Find out more about Post-Grad Community's 10 Year Anniversary
- Have you heard about our Family Heirloom project?
Post-Grad Portraits
Are you a UAL Postgraduate Alumni? We're looking to feature postgrads from the last decade in our Post-Grad Portraits Series. Complete our form to get involved.
UAL Post-Grad Community
Established in 2013, Post-Grad Community is an inclusive platform for all UAL postgraduate students to share work, find opportunities and connect with other creatives within the UAL and beyond. Find out more.