Emergency! Sarah Casey

The solo exhibition, Emergency! by Sarah Casey, was curated and presented at Drawing Projects UK from 12 November to 4 February 2023 by Taylor and Sangster.

Emergency! is an exhibition of new work by Sarah Casey developed in response to glacial archaeology. In 2018, at Valais Museums, Switzerland, Sarah began drawing artefacts that have emerged from alpine glaciers as the ice in which they have been preserved for 50, 500 or 5000 years is now melting at unprecedented rates. This glacial archaeology embodies a position of extreme precarity: these rare and valuable finds preserve important knowledge about the human past, yet insight comes at the cost of environmental change and threatened futures. Moreover, the artefacts themselves, once released from their frozen slumber, will rapidly decay and disintegrate when exposed. The Emergency! exhibition aims to explore this precarity asking how might processes of drawing – with its use of marking and erasure, presence and absence – negotiate these tensions and find new ways of thinking through loss and change? The drawings in the exhibition are made by trapping dust in wax and so, like the archaeology they depict, are contingent on their environmental conditions to survive – if they get exposed to heat, they will melt away. This research was developed through a Henry Moore Institute Research Fellowship 2021 and undertaken in dialogue with Valais History Museum, Switzerland.

The project and exhibition were supported by Lancaster University, Arts Council England and Drawing Projects UK and presented as part of the Being Human Festival 2022; Accompanied by a dedicated programme of online Drawing Discussions, in-person and online Drawing Sessions. A publication documenting the exhibition and research project will be published on 4 February 2023 by Drawing Projects UK.