Artist’s Statement

Zara Conway is an English born artist and theatre designer.  Within her work, she questions our perception of ordinary, everyday materials, revealing the sacred in the profane as an exploration of our interior mental space and how we, as constant observers, relate to the world around us.  Our relationship to the celestial is questioned and honoured through composite pieces that are more than the sum of their parts.  She engages with these materials in an often humorous dialogue; traversing the humble and the metaphysical.  Her work grows from the enjoyment of the materials themselves; tea bags, sardine tins and cloths pegs, often infused with her delight of the organic world and nature.  Their fragile impermanence underlying their nobility.  A nod to this mortal coil.

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.

Excerpt from Hamlet, To Be or Not To Be by Shakespeare