Sarah Rose - Torpor

Preview Friday 13 June, 7pm to 9pm

Sarah Rose’s practice spans sculpture, sound and installation to create works which explore ecological and environmental narratives. She is interested in the material residues of our everyday lives and how these impact our environment, often working with waste materials, by-products or found objects. Rose removes these materials from circulation, transforming them into artworks through alchemic and experimental processes.  

Rose’s exhibition at Tramway, Torpor, incorporates processes of material transformation using the basic elements of glass, heat and light. Through these mediums, she explores themes of power, energy, information, connection and environmental precarity.  The exhibition poses the question, ‘What might a feminist energy system look like?’ creating propositions for alternative, mutualistic energy systems that might provide sufficient energy for care and well-being rather than profit. The title refers to the phenomenon of summer torpor—a state of dormancy or slowed activity that some animals enter during high temperatures or resource scarcity—inviting reflection on energy conservation and resistance to constant productivity.

Rose harnesses solar energy to power kinetic sculptures and prototype animal habitats. These include a maternity box for bats, and glass components from electricity pylons repurposed as bird feeders to then encourage moth habitats. In doing so, Rose foregrounds the energy labour of other living beings i.e. bats and moths, and their relationship with maintaining human and non-human habitats.  

The exhibition traces the ways in which glass and light form part of our networks, from the fibre optic cables that are woven into our spaces to the reflective glass used to illuminate our road networks. The latter is one of Rose’s primary materials for the exhibition. Rose takes this industrial glass out of road production and hand-moulds it into fragile, organic sculptural forms. Many of these forms reference quietly productive, invisible or nocturnal ecosystems, such as flowers that bloom at night for nocturnal pollinators. A new audio work powered by transparent photovoltaic glass, a developing technology, powers an immersive nocturnal soundscape played across car radio speakers. 

Sarah Rose’s exhibition is generously supported by The Foundation Foundation.