Since her debut exhibition in 2015, Sarah Biggs has maintained an on-going fascination with the relationship between the human subject and the natural world, with each new body of work seeing a new evolution, expansion, or reimagining of this relationship, this inter-dependence. Biggs’ new body of work, Gathering dust, pushes through the vast landscapes depicted in earlier work and further into subjectivity, inviting the viewer not to observe others searching, but to embody the search themselves. Biggs calls on the viewer to become the subject, positioning them in amongst the brush, overwhelmed by swathes of colour that blur and dance in the periphery. And with this immersion comes the necessary loss of perspective, of boundaries, of direction. Biggs’ push deeper into abstraction in these new works further enables this shift in experience, as well as welcomes an expanded sensorium: abstracted mark-making serve to signal the non-visual, the importance of touch, smell and sound in the way we experience the natural world. In invoking this sense of embodiment and ambiguity, the exhibition represents a daring shift from observation to immersion, from macro to micro, from knowing to feeling.
Excerpt from exhibition text by Charis de Kock
