Sarah McEwan’s work on display

New work from Birrego-based artist Sarah McEwan currently features in the window gallery at Western Riverina Arts.

McEwan is a core member of The CAD Factory, which began as an underground warehouse space in Sydney during 2005 and relocated to the remote location of Birrego in August 2010. Since then The CAD Factory have developed a variety of artistic projects in the region.

Remapping the Self is an exhibition exploring the female voice and what influences have shaped internal dialogues. The work seeks to open up a conversation with the audience to ask the question, who forms your internal voice and what is the underlying ideology behind it? Is it based in patriarchy or a drive to question the past and speak your own language? To remap yourself beyond social constructions which bind you.

McEwan’s work is the visual exploration of these questions with reference to the self and the way identity is formed. A striking feature of these self-portraits is the fact that each figure contains no face. The face has been cut out and replaced with black threads. By eliminating the feature that identifies you, the strategy interrupts the notions of beauty and being defined by your physical features. The external falls away and the internal thoughts are left exposed where the private becomes public. The works become portraits of interior landscapes.

The threads and repeated lines are the physical representation of internal thoughts and reference Jacques Derrida’s notion of the spaces in between written language; the gaps between letters, the silence between one thought to the next. In each work the thoughts keep falling, representing that inner voice which ultimately manifests in to an external representation of who you are.

See Remapping the Self in the window gallery at Western Riverina Arts during September.