About

‘You are what I am not.
As I throw my body into You,
You push me back with the same force.
I leave You marked by my presence,
And all the while,
You leave me constantly grappling to find sense in Your blankness.

Together, our dance disturbs the air,
Ruffles the atmosphere around us as it flutters and caresses my skin.

You have always been what I am not.
Yet now,
I have made You into the representation of what I will never be.

Through movement we interacted,
Through paint and with my hand,
I leave my final mark having transformed You into my negative.

You are now something that was, but that will never be again.
You are the immortalised and static form of a fleeting atmospheric disruption
– a disruption that we once caused through our dance.’

You Are What I Will Never Be is an experimental mapping of iconographic marks representative of the space my body does not occupy as I dance on the canvas. Personifying the canvas as an entity with agency, these paintings become pictorial representations of an interaction between artist/dancer and canvas/dance partner, depicted through hand-made marks that impart changes in atmospheric qualities and the dynamism of movement performed.

Bio

Sarah Drew grew up in Canberra and moved to Sydney to study at Sydney College of the Arts in 2019. In Canberra, Drew studied Classical Ballet and Contemporary dance from age three at Lisa Clark Dance Centre. This foundation in Ballet and Contemporary movement practice has become intrinsic to her art-making. Drew combines notions of momentum and energy transfer from dance with painted mark-making to explore how bodily movement within space can be represented pictorially, whether indexical or iconographical.

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