Sarah Sands Phillips (b.Tsí Tkaròn:to, Canada) is a Red River Métis/British-Irish artist and poet. Her family names include Johnston, Richards, Moore, Truthwaite, Brown and Thomas. She completed an MFA at the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford in 2019. Her practice spans painting, photography, moving image, sculpture, and text. Fragmentary, bodily, and exploring themes of impermanence, her work is grounded in materiality, and engaged in process-oriented investigations of intuitive sites of presence and absence, intention and the skin. Sands Phillips has exhibited in Canada and internationally at the North Wall Arts Centre, UK, General Hardware Contemporary, CA, Angell Gallery, CA, Birch Contemporary, Gallery 44: Centre for Contemporary Photography, CA, and MULHERIN New York, NY. She is the recipient of a fully-funded Tsuzuki Scholarship, the Erna Plachte Scholarship, and awards from the Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work is in the collection of TD Canada Trust and RBC Collection. She is currently based in Tokyo, Japan.


www.sarahsandsphillips.com


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STATEMENT OF WORK

Sarah Sands Phillips is engaged in a multi-disciplinary process-oriented exploration of impermanence. Spanning painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, moving image, and text, she is interested in material knowledge, fragmentation, and the regeneration of objects.  By exploring intuitive sites of presence and absence, she finds ways of documenting the dissolving and translucent space between identity, intention, and the skin.

Influenced by new materialisms, Sands Phillips’ practice looks for the connections between, and seeks to level anthropocentric hierarchies by allowing work to both make itself, and also leave room for common materials and detritus –grapefruit peels, edamame skins, poetry edits, plastic carry bags– to be elevated. Her work sometimes consists of found objects in weathered states which contain the residues of human presence. The temporality of some materials parallels her interest in the body. The often labour intensive nature of her practice lends itself to conversations around connection and touch.

Through everyday observations, her practice is ultimately poetic in its dissolution. Utilising cyclical processes of layering and erasure results in a ritual undoing and reimagining of objects and surfaces.  In many ways her work acts as a document, tracing languages of time, intimacy, and loss. Her research forms ways of understanding her Indigenous identity, and how information and experiences are embedded within matter.