“. . . a palette of emotional nudges.”
“The title refers to contradictions involved in looking both inward and outward – the eyelash is the closest thing to the eye yet remains unseen, whilst the horizon is visible but never within reach,” curator Karen Hall tells me about Eye Lash Horizon, which marks the first comprehensive survey of the concepts, media, and preoccupations that – over two decades – have shaped the practice of Sydney-based artist Sarah Contos.
Contos’ practice is a diverse, process-motivated and research-driven one. It has embraced methods of making that include sculpture, textiles, painting, printmaking, video, installation, theatre design, and fashion. Hall worked with the artist on the 2022 Pliable Planes: Expanded Textiles & Fibre Practices exhibition and says “it felt like the perfect time to do a deep dive into her practice” – with a significant publication adding to the critical discourse on this practice.

Sarah Contos, MoTH-eRR (video still), 2023, three-channel digital video, colour, stereo, 06:00 minutes. Courtesy the artist and UNSW Galleries, Sydney
Hall says that Contos – a UNSW graduate – had a “strong sense of how this exhibition would manifest,” but also notes that, as part of the process-motivated nature of the artist’s practice, Contos’ “works often shift shape several times before reaching their final state.” Hall calling the exhibition’s development “collaborative but always artist driven.”
“Sarah and I were interested in the idea of the kaleidoscope to introduce the exhibition as a tapestry of ideas and materials which shift and turn, presented as a series of immersive installations across four interconnected spaces,” Hall explains. “Mapped loosely on the brain, womb, belly, and soul, the exhibition is drawn together thematically as one bodily whole where each installation alludes to both the physical and metaphoric body part it represents.”
Hall elucidates this for me through the ‘belly’ – “a space for emotions, inducing the sensation of ‘butterflies in the belly,’ where excitement, nerves and fears intermingle. Contos has created large hand-tufted forms with attached steel bars, mannequin hands, and vanity mirrors. Suspended from the ceiling they resemble cocoons or moults about to hatch or transform. These forms are both comforting and unsettling.”

1: Sarah Contos, Universes Built and Destroyed in a Dressing Room of a Protagonist Yet to be Born (RE-MARIA1984), 2024, and cast aluminium, electroplated objects, mild and stainless steel. 2 and 3: Sarah Contos, She Daemon Cracks (detail), 2024, stainless steel armature and hardware, mild steel, hand tufted acrylic and Australian wool fibres, mannequin hands, found vanity mirrors. Photographs: Jacquie Manning. Courtesy the artist and UNSW Galleries, Sydney
In works both comforting and unsettling we find deeply personal yet also collective themes, as the cultural and media references Contos draws on invite us in. “Contos is an avid film and television viewer, a voracious reader, a design and fashion enthusiast, a music fan, and a consumer of popular culture,” Hall tells me. “She draws from these interests to explore her own memories and to reflect upon broader collective ones. Layered references might range from the texture of a slushie drink to a Rococo costume to 1980s advertising.”
It’s in this way that, Hall says, “each work has the vibration of familiarity to it,” something that the artist describes as “a palette of emotional nudges.” Such nudges that are, in Hall’s words, “appealing to the viewer to reflect upon their own memories.” Yes, the immersive dimensions of the installations invite us to pick out our own memories . . . are a nudge for us to draw on our own cultural literacies . . . to make sense of, to apply, to embody the brain, womb, belly, and soul ourselves. But also – lucky us – these nudges come in a guided, physical, tangible way, by Contos’ own hand.
“Contos’ hand is visible in intricately cast aluminium sculptures and tufted textiles sitting comfortably alongside machine made furniture and found objects,” Hall says. “Images cut from magazines and books are shuffled by hand across the analogue technology of an overhead projector whilst a series of video works created with generative artificial intelligence models manipulate images beyond what we know (or think) is real.” In a pinch: “The exhibition spaces are dynamic and contrast harmony and anarchic play.”
Dr Joseph Brennan is a Lambda Literary Award-nominated author based in Tropical North Queensland.
UNSW Galleries
27 September to 24 November 2024
Sydney
Originally published in print – Art Almanac, October 2024 issue, pp. 30–32