Relief

Mixed media 2015

Sarah Wood & Sara Paynter, mixed media, 2015

In an exploration of connections and equivalencies, the 2015 Correspondence exhibition brought together past and present Cambridge Artworks’ artists to forge new partnerships and create new work in a celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Cambridge Artworks. Relief was Sarah Wood and Sara Paynter’s collaboration.

The term relief is from the Latin verb relevo, ‘to raise’. To create an object in relief is to give the impression that the sculpted material has been raised above the background. It is an optical trick. Neither one dimensional nor three dimensional the relief, like cinema, is an allegation of the real but in fact occupies an intermediate space, part material, part optical.

Sara Paynter is a potter and Sarah Wood is a filmmaker. They are meeting in the space between their usual practices, between illusion and materiality, to collaborate on an investigation into another liminal state: the territory of sleep. Playing with earlier English forms of image-making – the silhouette as a form of portraiture before photography reversed in Wedgewood’s black basalt ware using the sprig-moulded technique – this project revisits old processes and materials to create new forms and new meanings.