Sara Breinlinger’s collage and paintings emerge from a construction-like process where questions of time, history and memory are always embedded. Her collages bring into play fragments that once existed in other works. Archive materials from the past are mixed with the present and form new dialogues and relationships - changing the meanings and significance they carry. Parts get lost and found in the re-making. A re-edit, rediscovery and another iteration begins. Disparate elements are re-configured and transformed into new compositions and narratives. 

 

Robust organic shapes of colour are combined with hand drawn patterns and  scratchy intensely charged marks, that are repeatedly obliterated and resurrected. Graph paper intersects, lending a sense of gravity, a timeline, a measurement, something more rational and logical. The elements are torn and scraped back, repaired and stitched. The built-up layered surfaces hint at both vestiges of other narratives and the considered labour involved in the making. Surface nuance and subtleties of texture, borne from the materiality of different papers, their weights, finishes and age, bring a rich tactile quality to the works. 

 

Compositionally, they have a “just held togetherness” - precariously balanced but where a tension remains to inform the next generative possibilities.

 

The resulting works are playful, yet complex, each piece becoming a hopeful, optimistic act.

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