Surplus to Purpose

Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop is proud to present Surplus to Purpose, the solo residency exhibition by our current artist in residence Sanne Vaassen, who has been working in the studio space above the gallery from May to July 2019.

Sanne Vaassen has an instinctive, observational response relationship to the human condition and rarely accepts things at their face value, part sociologist part botanist, part poet, part sculptor all depends upon the nature of her gaze. Sanne sees the world through a lens that desires a type of simplicity that exists in nature, in flowers, that is unencumbered. By deconstructing social systems, political speeches & symbols, currencies, as well as social structures Sanne’s body of work transforms each object of focus beyond its purpose and importantly disempowers them, redefining and transforming. Flowers speak, public gardens write poetry, military rifle exercises become sculpture, currencies become films.

This is a territory of systems and their by-products that are manipulated and altered to shift perception and to nullify – a secondhand military blanket becomes the cradle for a sculpture of glass formed by the mimed movements of the military rifle excises. This is the world Sanne wants to inhabit – the grim become cuddly, the harsh soft, the reversal of weight to lightness. For Sanne, so much of modern societies systems are surplus to purpose and therefore she engenders a humorous reinterpretation, the absurdity of colourful paper being our most powerful method of exchange is ‘laughed at’ by shredding money and creating a film. This is an artist whose body of work is a breath of fresh air, or perhaps a reinvented scent, lifting the heaviness of our time and reminding us of our peculiar animal humanness.