Sara Bjarland

In her sculptures and installations, Bjarland uses discarded objects and materials that she finds in the city, to investigate overlaps and encounters of the natural and the arti-ficial, the living and the non-living. On al-most daily bike rides past the enormous trash piles in Amsterdam, Bjarland collects objects such as pieces of furniture, dead house plants, plastic flowers, garden acces-sories, bits of fences, cat crab posts, floor mobs, broken pipes, building materials, etc. She sees these as leftovers of the materialist society that we live in and important carriers of value and meaning, despite their loss of function. Using approaches and strategies like reappropriation, manipulation and some-times photographic staging, Bjarlands work is a way of recycling, preserving and caring for the materials she reclaims. It is also a quiet criticism of western consumerism and the enormous waste accumulation that re-sults from it. Bjarland likes to think of her studio as a garden where objects gather, cross-pollinate and grow into new hybrid forms and beings, reminiscent of strange plants or creatures. She looks for combinations of objects that talk back to her. This process is highly intuitive and associative. The rela-tions between the objects and how they func-tion together is important, and she often arranges them into groups or species, ima-gining them as inhabitants of a world without humans, where discarded materials start to have a life of their own and become actors or characters. With the support of Mondriaan Fund.