The sculptor Sarah Pager gets ready for Spirit of Invention Festival 2024

The Spirit of Invention Festival is hotting up. Jude Montague talks to Sarah Pager a sculptor and artist who is contributing to the exhibition at Electro Studios Project Space 7- 13 May 2024 and is running a workshop for family groups and adults at Hastings Museum on Sunday 26 May 2024.

Sarah Pager: The great thing about being an artist is that you can run with ideas to examine notions of how the world is works. For example, my latest artwork series is based on the idea that humans were invented by water as a device to transport it from one place to another. This gives rise to a different way of thinking about our world view. Sometimes I feel that my studio is a laboratory and I am a crazy inventor making weird hybrids of plants and animal anatomy.

Jude Montague: What artwork are you creating for the exhibition and how does it fit the invention theme?

SP: Like all inventions my plans are top secret and will be unveiled at the opening. I can tell you my work will involve vegetables and a catalyst which gives you an entirely new way of seeing.

JM: What kind of construction do you like to use in your sculpture and what do you like about the materials and process?

SP: Currently I like to use a welded structure or skeleton to build the work on – using a mixture of casting and sculpting the work evolves. I like casting as it feels like magic, especially when you can make something that has more detail than the eye can actually see, I like being able to use colour in the work, its a little like building a body.

JM: Organic versus mechanical? Do you think this is a false opposition?

SP: I think the more we learn, the more blurred the boundaries become – after all, we are just really soft machines with neurons firing on electricity.

JM: Logie Baird’s television experiments are aimed at transmitting moving images over great distances. It seems like magic. Is that inspiring in any way in your work? Does communication have an element in your practice here?

SP: Yes. As Arthur C Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” But really everything is magic, quantum physics and the notion of things only being there when observed means the communication of the work to the viewer is an essential part of it.

JM: What can people expect who come to ‘Spirit of Invention’ workshops at the Hastings Museum.

SP: Food for thought

The Spirit of Invention Festival 2024 celebrates the 1ooth anniversary of the invention of television by John Logie Baird in Hastings.

Electro Studios Project Space: 9–11 May
Open Evening: Friday 9 May

Hastings Museum: 25–26 May

Sat 25 May:
Talk on John Logie Baird by Jude Montague

Sun 26 May:
Workshop with Sarah Pager
Workshop with A Curious Agenda (Sun 26 May)

Also in: Visual Arts

« Archipelago, Sinéid Codd exhibition at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery
Poor Women exhibition and workshop: art and regeneration come to Priory Meadow »