Sara Maher: How We Disappear...

My work emerges through my experience of natural landscape, where I imagine time and space on a vast and immeasurable scale. Through my making I seek to mirror moments of immersion, when we slip out of temporal awareness, when we disappear into this vastness, and when our sensorium is heightened and transformed.

Places where I have undertaken residencies over recent years are the Central Highlands and West Coast region of Tasmania, and Outback NSW. In these ancient terrains I feel a sense of wonder and unease, I imagine a collective presence, a land laden with memory and shadow is watching me. Art making is a means through which I attempt to reconcile the tension within this experience. It is how I come to find my existential bearing within the immeasurable scale and perpetual motion of life at large.

Through reflecting recurring patterns and processes of the natural world, and through seeming to inhabit a space of transition between intimate detail and expansive scale, materiality and immateriality, form and formlessness, my work engages the viewer in ways which extend perception. It affirms a symbiotic connection between abstract inner life and the tangible physical world. There is a resonating presence, a weightlessness; one perceives optical vibration between surface detail and illusory expanse. In its viewing, it becomes a textured field of sensory perception, a merging of mind with matter. There is a sense of threshold, with an invitation to step 'through' into an interior vastness.

My making is an ongoing distillation of memory, time, and place, and a journeying between.