Torremolinos-Tableaux-Tongue-Twister (After Sun) Sarah Roberts

Torremolinos-Tableaux-Tongue-Twister (After Sun)
Sarah Roberts

Exhibition: 8th April – 6th May 2017  |  In conversation event: 28th April 2017

Her tongue twisted around names and melting ice pops as the dark closed in on the pinks and the sky clouded into sticky reds.
Heat soaked, the rubber looked like it was melting into gloop or sweating like a wet egg on a paving slab.
He was eating an iced cream and the colour was caught in the bristle of his whisker.
She scribbled a smile on a postcard and drew tan lines on her upper thighs.
The towel with an insignia of a pink flamingo branded her underside and she turned her torso, showing off an underdone rippled rear.
It looked like a plaster had been pulled off at her edges, calamine on frankfurters rolled over and flayed.
Later as they strolled she spoke in loud English
Still talking, he failed to listen to her pink wet mouth moving up the promenade, resplendent as it was, well moisturized amidst the dried renders crumbling in the corners of their eyes.
Fans cooled their ideas and the palms of her hands from the heat-stroking
Construction workers stopped drilling the bellies of swimming pools and bowels of basements
She looked out of plate glasses into a window – noticing people making holidays.
Walking on, admiring words making up menus, she stooped to pick pink rocks from the beach.
A man with a head like a ripe peach walked in front of her
pounding and bobbing on the pathway that peeled back and forth
beside the sea, kept as bay.
She smiled, knowing there would be bruised peaches at breakfast.
The sun had gone right down into the mean reds
It seemed nothing was as it was as the cabaret began
The sound of a sequin dress ripping its fabric carried on the mechanical breeze from the bar
Seams were torn asunder as a mosquito bit firmly into her upper arm and the carpet was pulled out from under.
________________________________________

Block 336 presented Torremolinos-Tableaux-Tongue-Twister (After Sun), a site-specific installation by Sarah Roberts and the first solo presentation of the artist’s work.

Sarah Roberts collects surfaces, and her practice demonstrates an ongoing interest in the momentary encounters with the actuality of the world – primarily with the visible surface of architecture, landscape and the body. She is as arrested by a carpet tile from a mid-Wales social club as she is by a vista of a seemingly endless desert and her works focus on moments in which such peripheral surfaces or epic vistas can be seen as (but not reduced to) collisions in colour and form. Once perceived in this way, surfaces become ripe for the picking and ready to be peeled off and stretched over reflexive prints, textures and forms like some essential recycling or re-stratification of the material world.

In Torremolinos Tableaux Tongue Twister (After Sun), the surface of the popular tourist destination Torremolinos has been transformed into a fleshy, flashing place of red limbs in lycra suits, slipping and sliding out of swimming pools and dripping down rendered walls. Provenance of place is not hidden, but also not overtly explained as at the work goes way beyond representation. (After Sun) is the second stanza from Torremolinos. First exhibited in 2016 as part of the BAS8 Associates programme at HaHa Gallery, Southampton, the same work has been re-cast for Block 336 in a blood-shot, late-night form.

On entering the gallery, the viewer is invited to investigate an environment of red excess. Two tons of ruddy gravel spilled like a flailing fat tongue stretches out through the space. Hand-cast plaster pieces, found objects, glass, rubber and glitter as well as large-format images of everyday surfaces have been smoothed over the existing gallery walls and floors. In creating these landscapes, vistas or reflexive objects, Roberts wants us to consider the reality of our constructed surfaces and how they inform the narratives we create. She terms this approach, ‘a casual politic’ that instead of ‘shouting the odds’ – creates a vantage point from which to gaze out onto the terror and appetite of our newly made realities.

Sarah Roberts is a Welsh Artist currently living and working in London and Wales. Recent exhibitions include SellYourSelf East Street Arts, Leeds; I’M Feeling So Virtual I’m Violent [BAS8 Associates] HaHa Gallery, Southampton. P A N D I C U L A T E [The Joy of Stretching], The Koppel Project, London; The London Open 2015, Whitechapel Gallery, London; Graduating from Chelsea College of art in 2014, she has since been selected for the 2015/16 Into The Wild Residency Programme, Chisenhale, London, ACAVA /ArtQuest Lifeboat residency 2014/15; The Parasol Unit Exposure Award 2014, and Saatchi New Sensations, London, 2014.

On 28th April  Block 336 hosted a walk-through of the exhibitions and a panel discussion with the artists Sarah Roberts and Mark Jackson discussing about their respective practices with artist, writer and lecturer Paul O’Kane.