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Dropdown IV, 2020
von • by Sarah Bird
www.sarahbirdart.co.uk

There were plenty of ways people could spend their time during

the COVID-19 lockdown period – homebodies discovered their

love for homemade sourdough, sports enthusiasts pedalled

away on their spinning bikes, virtuosos gave piano concerts

with the balcony doors open, while others simply stared into

space. Just like artist Sarah Bird from London. However, she

made a discovery while staring: wall surfaces, ceilings, skirting

boards, joints, wall protrusions, room corners, door frames

and window glass all have an aesthetic value if you look at
them closely enough. Bird’s indoor photo collages from the

Interrupted Expanses series, created in 2020 and continued in

subsequent years, therefore depict individual elements of the

spatial boundaries in extreme close-up images. With the help of

digital image processing, the artist later superimposed fragments

of her photographs in a new, prismatic arrangement, causing the

architectural lines and forms to lose their original context. Bird

then overlaid the resulting abstract surface compositions with

radial colour gradients that she had previously generated from

individual colour pixels in the photographs. Some of the objects

appear almost like digitally backlit displays, floating freely in the

picture and creating fascinating contrasts in combination with

the strongly focused, rough texture of painted wall and wooden

surfaces. It remains unclear for quite some time what we are

actually looking at here – an image of a painting on a rugged

background or a photograph of irregular surfaces? By choosing

the intensely textured archival paper as the image carrier, Bird

further emphasises this interrelationship between the digital

and physical visual language.