On Making and Unmaking: A Conversation with Sarah Blackwood

I think I've always been uncomfortable with the idea of art as something static and permanent. In nature, everything is in flux—growing, decaying, transforming. But we enter a gallery and expect to see things frozen in time, preserved forever. There's something dishonest about that to me, or at least incomplete. It doesn't reflect how we actually experience the world.

For the Serpentine show, I made several pieces using water-soluble materials, hygroscopic salts, things that would absorb moisture from the air and slowly change. One piece was a tower of compressed salt blocks. Over six weeks, it gradually collapsed into a beautiful crystalline pile. Visitors could see it in any stage of that transformation—fully upright, listing to one side, or completely collapsed. Each state had its own kind of integrity.

It's complicated. I've been lucky to work with some collectors and institutions who understand what I'm doing—who see value in documentation, in the concept, in the experience of having witnessed something that no longer exists. But yes, it's been a barrier. Early in my career, I made more traditional work because I thought I had to. It sold, which was good, but something felt wrong about it.

The turning point came about ten years ago. I made this large bronze sculpture—technically accomplished, beautiful patina, exactly what people wanted from me. And the day before it was supposed to ship to a collector, I took a sledgehammer to it. Just destroyed it. My gallerist was furious. But I felt this incredible sense of relief, like I'd finally done something honest.

I stopped trying to make work that would last and started making work that was interesting to me. Some of it involves destruction, but not all of it. The common thread is that I'm interested in processes—in transformation, in what materials want to do rather than what I force them to do. Ice that melts. Clay that cracks as it dries. Paper that tears under its own weight.

Every material has properties—how it responds to pressure, to moisture, to temperature, to time. Traditional sculpture is often about imposing form on material, bending it to your will. What I try to do is collaborate with the material, set up conditions and see what happens. Sometimes that means failure. A structure collapses before I expected. Ice melts too quickly. But those 'failures' are often more interesting than what I planned.

There's a piece I made last year—a wall of ice blocks stacked without mortar. I knew it would eventually melt, but I didn't know how. As it turned out, it melted unevenly. Some blocks fused together, others slipped and created these beautiful cantilevers that shouldn't have been structurally possible. The final form, just before it collapsed completely, was something I could never have designed. The material figured it out.

Both, I suppose. I work with a photographer who understands what I'm trying to do. We document the work at different stages, but the photos aren't meant to be a substitute for the experience. They're traces, evidence that something existed. Sometimes I think the photographs are more interesting because of what they can't capture—the smell of melting wax, the sound of salt crystals forming, the way the light changed as a piece deteriorated. The absence in the documentation points to the importance of presence, of being there.

I've been thinking about working with sound—vibrations that affect material over time. Also biological processes, though that gets complicated ethically. But fundamentally, I'm interested in the same questions: What does it mean to make something that won't last? What value is there in work that exists only as memory? In a world that's increasingly about preservation and archiving, I think there's something important about practicing letting go.