September Friends Night with artist Sarah Goffman

Please join us for an artist talk with exhibiting artist Sarah Goffman who has work featured in the current exhibition at the Drill Hall Gallery – Backwash

Sarah Goffman is an installation artist and forensic garbologist delving into the discarded remnants of our society and refashioning the world in a consumer context. She describes herself as a “trash converter”.

“Growing up in New York City in the seventies I saw abandoned spaces, defunct factories and huge lots filled with weeds. Artists occupied those fringes and collected garbage which they converted into art, it intrigued me. Now I like to think of the packaging of an object as its cloak, the thought engages multiple metaphors that I am attracted to. The found objects I use in my work direct their own placement. I’m just a conduit, being instructed by the bower birds in nature.”

She works with discarded materials; detritus, trash, waste, garbage, rubbish. It is a revelry within a sort of discipline that examines the synthesised tactility and materiality of our lives in this culture.

Based in Melbourne, she has been configuring mixed media installations since 1994. She has exhibited across Australia and internationally in over two hundred shows. Highlights include; I am a 3-D Printer 2017 at Wollongong Art Gallery with over one hundred copies of the Mann-Tatlow Asian collection displayed in the purpose-built showcases, Applied Arts at the Chau Chak Wing Museum 2021, Plastici 2012 at Penrith Regional Gallery, and following that in 2015 she collected and arranged $30,000 worth of non-perishable food items to donate to Oz Harvest, City of Plenty. Over the last decade many other group shows including: Situation, Museum of Contemporary Art (2005) and Everything Falls Apart, Artspace Sydney (2012); Camouflage (2013) at Sydney College of the Arts and Janis 2 with the Commercial Gallery, NSW, and in 2017 one of the commissioned artists at ACCA, Melbourne as part of Unfinished Business. In 2022 she had a solo exhibition at Deakin University, The Garbage and the Flowers and in 2023 a Dobell Foundation commissioned piece currently installed at Wagga Wagga National Glass Art Gallery, Precious.

She has undertaken residencies at Artspace, the Performance Space, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, Frasers Studios (Sydney), Stone Villa (Sydney) and she was awarded the 2009 Australia Council for the Arts residency in Tokyo. In 2011 she was awarded an Asialink studio in Tokyo to work and research Dream Island, the artificially created island in Tokyo bay, followed by a residency in Yokohama for Life 3, a Bank Art initiative.

Most recently she won the Merrogal Arts Prize and completed a Bundanon residency.

Goffman has a wide range of working methods which include performance actions such as Lucy from Charles Schultz’s “Peanuts” cartoon, Psychiatrist 5c 7c 50c $2 and Tea Lady, merging Japanese and English tea ceremonies for Wabi-sabi Afternoon Tea, first performed for Sydney Festival 2013. Most recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Dz9IL5A2rs&t=8s

http://www.sarahgoffman.com