Sarah Plummer

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Current Exhibition:

April 13 - May 18, 2024.

There’s no telling time

Jackie Castillo, Shabez Jamal, Sarah Plummer, Xiao He, Cesar Herrejon, Magaly Cantú.

Group Exhibition.

Release:

+ File; Curate LA; Artillery.

Press:

+ Feature (LA Art Party: April 13, 2024).

+ This Week’s Must-See Art (Curate LA: April 11-17, 2024).

+ LA Art Openings & Spotlight (ArtRabbit: April 10, 2024).

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Bio

Sarah Plummer is a collaborative printer, maker, and writer, lately of Australia and more recently of California. She was raised in Sydney and moved to the USA to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Printmaking) at Rhode Island School of Design before attending Tamarind Institute’s Professional Printer Training Program for collaborative lithography. She has worked on fine-art prints at Wingate Studio, Gemini G.E.L. and for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 150th anniversary. Within the last year, she has been operating her own collaborative studio, Speck Editions, on unceded Tongva/Gabrielino land—in Los Angeles. Sarah is captivated by the alchemic expanse of lithography and loves things that seem impossible. While she finds the opportunity to bring well-honored, innovative approaches to artists and their work as one of the greatest pleasures, her work—print and otherwise—leads an investigation into land, memory, material, grief, love, and freedom.

My current projects unite the traditional craft of lithography with place-based research, writing, and land relations, fostering connection and communication not only between artistic disciplines, but with kingdoms of beings and landscapes to which I am devoted. For almost two years I have been researching tree gums in both Australia and California that possess similar molecular, physiochemical, and rheological compositions to Gum Arabic, as potential alternatives in the lithographic process. Lithography as it is practiced today remains dependent on the global extraction and exploitation of the earth’s resources—carbon, fossil fuels and bitumen, to name a few—as well as human exposure to toxic chemicals. Such practices are materially and ideologically implicated in structures of domination and climate change, relying upon the ongoing colonial legacy of resource extraction. When it comes to industrial image production, Gum Arabic is often overlooked as a player against the myriad of material agents contributing to environmental damage. It is my humble hope that understanding the chemistry of a gum that can be collected from where we are could offer us a way to localize a prescribed material that is currently sourced from the Sudan. I strive for a relationship with the planet, and with place, that does not assume colonial entitlement and access to land. Since it is this very posture of entitlement that enables more ecologically harmful extraction to occur, I see the two as alive and inextricable.

Diving deep into the source material of reality reveals the ways materials are disentangled from place and turned into something fungible. This gum research relates to a larger engagement with site-specificity and the indexing of place—the history and memory that lives in land, and the ways that we may choose to shepherd our world (and ourselves) into a new era of repair.

In this vein, I have also been incorporating said gums into some very new sculptural work that is made almost entirely from paper (papier-mâché) and gum. For me, the work is talismanic, and perhaps possessed of an ancestral vision. Creating these sculptures feels like some kind of epigenetic intervention of the spirit: roaming back through the cellular history of my own body, a remembering of wholeness. The meaningful re-mattering and remembering of our own bodies and the bodies of our ancestors is an act of resistance—it is a matter of human survival, as well as the planet’s.

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Exhibitions with the Gallery: