Peer Sessions # 111 @ Artquest Salon ONLINE
Elisabetta Antonucci // Sarah Strachan
6.30-9.30pm Weds 9th Oct 2024
Notes
We initially discussed Elisabetta Antonucci's film ‘Breath of a Stone’ (2024). The group identified a meditative quality to the film, enhanced by the repetitive soundtrack of wind, waves and wind chimes. The conversation revolved around the idea of deep time, with reference to the rocks, shells and bones, and the idea that these will eventually become fossilised into back into the earth.
Sarah Strachan's installation ‘Dawn (xenogenesis)’ (2024) featured handmade ceramic objects displayed upon a mound of earth. The discussion veered from viewing the installation as an alien landing; a monument to organic forms (mushrooms and eggshells were referenced); and an analysis of the artist's passion for the materiality of ceramics and the human hand in their creation.
Images (from top):
1. Elisabetta Antonucci, ‘Breath of a Stone’, 2024, (film still)
2. Elisabetta Antonucci, ‘Breath of a Stone’, 2024, (film still)
3. Sarah Strachan, ‘Dawn (xenogenesis)’, 2024, (hand built stoneware ceramic vessels and topsoil, size approx 200 cm x 200 cm, installed at Violent Bodies at The Ugly Duck, London, February 2024).
4. Sarah Strachan, ‘Dawn (xenogenesis)’, 2024, (detail - hand built stoneware ceramic vessel).
More about the artists
Elisabetta Antonucci (she/they, 1979) is a multimedia installation artist who lives and works between Venice IT and London. They use a deep exploration of queer-ecological practices that reorient the relationships of the human and non-human. Through films that use stillness and methods of meditative contemplation, they look to promote new ecological understandings for the viewer. Projects arise from intense collaborations with musicians and performers; their final outcomes are detailed multimedia installations, realised with practice and materials as sustainable as possible.
Elisabetta received a MA in Artists' Film and Moving Image from Goldsmiths (2022) and a Graduate Diploma in Fine Arts from UAL.
Sarah Strachan (b. 1974 Andover, UK) is a transdisciplinary printmaker, painter and ceramicist based in Cambridge (UK), where she completed an MA in Fine Art in 2022 following a career pivot to focus on her practice in 2017. Her works, which often incorporate sound or moving-image, centre on environmental changes. Installations like Dawn (xenogenesis) or With my back to the world are sparked by deep conversations with people, place, the land and its materials. Collaboration is an important element of her practice whether as an independent artist, creative tutor, working as artist duo Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity or as art, geology and sound collaborative Mud Collective.