Sara BjarlandGroundwork

In her sculptures and installations, Bjarland uses discarded objects and materials that she finds in the city, to investigate overlaps and encounters of the natural and the artificial, the living and the non-living. On al-most daily bike rides past the enormous trash piles in Amsterdam, Bjarland collects objects such as pieces of furniture, dead house plants, plastic flowers, garden accessories, bits of fences, cat crab posts, floor mobs, broken pipes, building materials, etc. She sees these as leftovers of the materialist society that we live in and important carriers of value and meaning, despite their loss of function. Using approaches and strategies like reappropriation, manipulation and some-times photographic staging, Bjarlands work is a way of recycling, preserving and caring for the materials she reclaims. It is also a quiet criticism of western consumerism and the enormous waste accumulation that results from it.