Padrenuestro

Royal Scottish Academy Award. PANDEMIC, 2020 Exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 2021

The work is traveling to: Sala Consulado del Mar, Diputación de Burgos, Spain, February, 2022


“Padrenuestro” (Our Father) evokes heightened psychological states of grief during the COVID-19 pandemic. The work assemblages feelings of a fragmented existence, where thoughts merge with the physicality of space and memory. Images are entombed in beeswax, marks of a personal ceremony. The installation imparts a strong sense of sadness, poetical time passing and of grieving in a confined space.

The artist’s father died of COVID-19 in Spain at the beginning of the pandemic, when lockdown was imposed on an international level and grief became postponed: a matter to be solved after “everything comes back to normal”. Confinement breeds a strong relation with the space inhabited day after day, and a yearning for a tangibility located thousands of kilometers away. The connection between images/thoughts and materials is key to this body of work.

Sara fuses her own images and those made by her father in objects, tangibly manifesting an intimate connection that no longer exists. A space lost in time for both of them, father and daughter.

“I use scans of my father’s photographs and my digital photocollages, forming a bond between us, melting us together. When I was a kid, he would set up a makeshift darkroom in the bathroom of our house and show me how to process analogue photography. The whole process has helped me say goodbye, using the darkroom at the Glasgow Print Studio and the domesticity of my flat as our sacred spaces, where we can be reunited”.