Sari Walker-Woods

Sari Walker-Woods is a Sydney based emerging artist practicing on Gadigal Land with a Bachelor of Fine Art at the National Art School. 

Her practice largely works with remembrance and testament of surface through the archival agency of ‘trace’ as a fossil. Walker-Woods collects, captures and preserves body matter and discard by transforming it into solid artefacts or textual forms through means of casting and embossing. Casts allow her to capture the tensions and pressures held within a mould whilst the relief recognises the intricate scarification of surface. She acknowledges her works as mixed media relief prints that function as intimate contact relics and archive the forensic examination of translation, interaction and inter-dimensional trauma between object and touch. 

Walker-Woods’ practice is heavily situated within the domains of process based making and as such the artwork evolves from material character and through the tactile experience of utilising a body to create. 

Tell us about your creative process, what drives your practice?

For me, printmaking is an intimate process that utilises tactile sensations to initiate a performance of translation. I like to play with this sensitivity of print media to collect, uncover and preserve sensory traces. 

This idealism of remembrance and testament of surface and its’ embedded markings has carried into my current practice in the obsession of trace as a fossil. Although my interest in trace encompasses the remains left by varying activity, I am currently concerned with human interaction and how traces can capture sensations and experiences in this essence of an archival autobiography. 

How do you use the materiality of printmaking to explore archival agency?

Within my practice the process of casting and relief printing allows me to explore the nature of transference. A cast transfers the contact that is incised on the flesh of a linoleum matrix like forensics, revealing invisible, micro texture and trace. Often casting in materials such as concrete, latex or body matter, these resolved casts (or as I like to term them as ‘prints’) pays homage to the tactile fantasies within the skin of the matrix and the interaction of the body in the process of making. The haptic engagement within the processes of printmaking allows me to collect and archive these more organic traces of the body. The pressure and impact within a press bed has resonance to the matrix acting as a body that can be manipulated by processes of interaction, the touch, the kiss, hands that move across surfaces and our bodies as the conductor of the interaction. At each stage in the process of making, our body works so readily with print media that markings are left everywhere like a crime scene. Traces can become recognised as alive. Here, the matrix can be sensualised, and the print is the contact relic that translates process. The reforming of matter within a press or a mould archives the experience of inter-dimensional trauma between object and touch.

What is the significance of text and language within your printmaking practice?

Personally, language and textual forms are the most instinctual and viable method to deconstruct my own experience as an artist. Short sharp and stark statements are often my preferable visual and conceptual choice of phrasing. There is enough negative space within the sentence to allow audiences to adapt their own interpretations and the absence of further dialogue is consistent with the fragments of human trace that remain within space after the absence of inhabitance. For these reasons, the materialisation of collected traces have largely become actualised by textual form throughout my current body of work. Casting and embossing text is the most natural direction my practice has taken. Despite the tensions and pressures that are held within a mould, a cast can pull honest and delicate remnants from one surface onto another body and within the final relief there is recognition of the intricacy of written markings and the scarification of text on a surface. 

Are there any female printmakers | artists that influence you?

I instinctually look to sculpture or photography-based artists working with unconventional materials or modes of installation, however I can’t help but see printmaking lingering modestly and un-claimed in the background of all these artist’s practices. 

I could write forever about the printmaking revolution but for now one of the two contemporary artists I am currently obsessed with is Alice Potts who works primarily at the intersection of textiles and science. Potts collaborates with science departments and institutions internationally to crystalise human sweat, a product of toil and DNA into elegant, valuable embellishments and redefine the beauty and significance of human bacteria. Equally as elegant, Rose Lynn Fisher creates refined and beautiful photographs of microscopic tears, whereby she observes the crystalline structures under a microscope and identifies differing geometric shapes and their relationship to the emotion that conjured that specific tear. Marliène Oliver is probably my most favourable female printmaker as she uses digital technologies and scanning methodologies to dissect the interior body and contemplate the digital copy. Her sculptural resolution and often kinetic installations inspire me to push the traditional boundaries of print-media.  

Finally, what exciting projects are you working on at the moment?

I am currently existing in the aftermath of graduating my BFA at the National Art School and frolicking in all the new and exciting prospects. With the new year upon us, fellow artist and friend Elena Hanke and I are diving into the fresh world of curating as we are in the works of collaborating with emerging artists to introduce and elevate printmaking in the public domain. This will likely see us utilise unconventional spaces, times and environments to exhibit. 2023 marks not only new exhibitions but written publications that will emerge from this project, exploring discourse and dialogue as a means to amplify the voice of print-media. 

Out of the institution environment I am very excited to be able to start nurturing a community-based art practice that sees my learnt skills and knowledge of printmaking shared with the public, another little voice to share the beauty that is print. I am working not only in the realms of shared learning and workshops, but also on collaborating with public audiences to explore collective trace through interactive installation and participatory transfer. Keep an eye out as this project is just beginning. I would love for anyone to be a donor of trace, whether that be grease, dirt, a kiss or body matter, some form of memorial translation of touch and presence.