Sallie Burton

Sallie Burton is an emerging artist based in nipaluna / Hobart. After many years working in science communication roles she turned to art making and has found direction in printmaking, performance, videography and installation and has exhibited and assisted developing various group shows. Her interdisciplinary work explores embodied-movement as a processual creative study, identified by a cathartic need to communicate being in this place and time.

Her works often considers perception and societal constructions of the ‘other’ in an effort to highlight the limitations of singular narratives and explore the idea that there are things we will never fully understand. Having wide interests, she is currently influenced by the experience of having lived for a period in her maternal homeland, Latvia, where she became intrigued by a blend of the contemporary and traditional in Baltic music, mythology as well as choral singing. Her latest work embraces ritual and intuitive processes to explore other ways of knowing through abstract, performative and participatory approaches to the theme of relationships with the natural and built environment and the social extensions of these spaces.

Her work can be situated by its reference to the abstract expressionists’ subconscious creativity and elements of happenings’ minimalism, anti-aesthetic, ambiguity of life, art and authorship and the noncommodifiable. In focussing on process, ephemerality and chance outcomes, her work shares concern with avant-garde movements of the 20^th century surrounding change, social upheaval and environmental loss by sustaining a tension between conventional and unconventional practice that mirrors displacement in contemporary society.