To help you get to know the Studio Fridays artists better, I’ve asked each of them to share three pieces of their work and answer three questions about their practice. Here is……

Sarah D’Souza

1. My favourite work from last year is:

2. The piece I am working on now is:

3. My favourite work ever is:

4. Describe your process of working from ideas to resolution

I work with everyday objects, like till receipts, security envelopes and disposable gloves. These act as gateways through which to explore personal, social and political realities. Observing and documenting the world around me is a critical part of my practice and the trigger for new work. Material experimentation and secondary research – for example looking at the history and ethnography of care homes for my Care Worn series – further helps to inform and refine the work toward resolution.

5. What pieces are you working on at the moment? 

Informed by a recent holiday abroad, Grey Area maps the life cycle of hotel bed linen and the system of labour needed to maintain it. Typically, hotel bed linen is decommissioned after 100 washes, the extreme heat and chemical brighteners accelerating material breakdown. The work involved charging my hands with charcoal dust to fill and empty a white pillow case with a pillow 100 times so that a grey patina accumulated over the surface of the objects creating a visible history of effort. The work explores the laundering of labour and history, the hotel as a site of luxury and displacement and my complicity in those systems as artist, consumer and tourist.

6. Who are your artist influences?

I am currently very interested in the ‘maintenance’ art work of Mierle Laderman-Ukeles, Mary Kelly, particularly Post Partum Document and Mona Hatoum’s domestic objects. My all time favourite piece of art is Michael Landy’s Breakdown.