Low Down Articles
Artist Profiles - Sarah Hatton
Article 26 of 73
From the book Artists of the Gatineau Hill by Catherine Joyce. This article first appeared in the "Artist Profiles" column in the March 7, 2007 issue of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
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Layering the Strata of Lost Childhood
Sarah Hatton is a young visual artist in Chelsea who is quickly making her mark on the national stage. With a skilled blend of photographic and painterly techniques, she is documenting cultural patterns with the practiced eye of an archivist.
Her paintings are iconic - visual representations of a state of mind. In a number of recent series she has explored the ambiguous territory of childhood within a culture that promotes Self as object, as commodity, from the earliest age. She has documented children on display in her Next Showing series about the Dionne Quintuplets, child beauty pageant hopefuls in her Turn jar the Judges series, and the secret world of girls in her "Role Models" series. Now in an upcoming show, play | fight, she has turned her reflective mirror upon the gestural language of boys at play/at war.
Through a growing body of work, where one series informs another, Sarah is mapping a landscape that began in a fascination with old photographs. From a young age, as her family moved from England to Canada to Barbados and back to Canada, Sarah kept mementos of her childhood as a stay against the constant disappearing of earlier lives. She first used these artifacts for her Master of Fine Arts (Calgary, 2001), layering images past and present - her old Barbadian private school with its prim uniforms, now lying in ruins, tropical plants spiraling up through its once orderly halls. Her paintings moved in one long line like a film strip, documenting the strata of lost childhood.
This fascination with the fluidity of time and memory, this repositioning of old photographs into a current context, has deepened with Sarah's work at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. In 2004 she exhibited her Incendiary series, charting the great fires of Canadian history. With her trademark use of layers, glazes and drips, she worked with fire-based media - charcoal, volcanic sand, raw umber - mixing in beeswax and plant resin. And then with a router, she carved into the paint the delicate imprint of the plants that survived.
All of her work has an edge, a dark seam that flows from her unflinching commitment to the complexity of truth. "I don't shy away from controversy because I know there is never one interpretation. I document with a purpose, with a sense that there will always be some redemptive theme in the darkness and, equally, some undercurrent to the light."
There is also a poetic effect that stems from literary influences. Time, memory, history, perception - these are the preoccupations of the poet. Sarah steeped herself in Canadian literature at Queen's, where she was the first BFA student to win the coveted, national Chancellor's scholarship, 1995-99. She sees the connections between the Canadian landscape and the need to make story that lies at the root of the Canadian character - expressed in the photos she sees daily at the Archives.
"I always troll back in memory, in history, and I ask 'How reliable is this document?', knowing that I must record the frozen moment, capture its elusive spirit, however incompletely. My work is idea driven, multifaceted; the paint finds its own way as each piece evolves."
Represented in Ottawa by Dale Smith Gallery, and at HaldeGalerie in Zurich, Switzerland, Sarah Hatton continues her alchemical quest to embody in art what compels her in the culture, past and present. "Growing up I became aware that certain things stick in my head - they belong to me. I had to do something about them."