Sadie’s work explores themes of journey, cooperation, and principally, human-kind’s relationship to the environment and the other life forms that we share it with. It seeks to explore our interdependence, and express her love for the natural world.
“All things are connected.
Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.”
Chief Seattle of the Suquamish speaking to
President Franklin Pierce in the mid-seventeenth century.
“Myths…. shape different parts of the world inside our heads… as encounters with the inapprehensible, the numinous….” A.S.Byatt, Ragnarok.
Sadie Brockbank’s sculptures, paintings, collage and drawing have stayed fresh and surprising encounters with myth for me over many years. Curves and forces move in the sculptures and paintings complemented by colour or mass so as to catch a moment in some undefined story. Elephants, dog-people, night-birds or deer, the bird on the shoulder, remain absorbing and grow with repeated looking. Sadie’s observation is deep, accurate and precise; her composition of forms, which hint at narrative but aren’t limited by it, represent an unusual talent and vision.
The photographs on this web-site can’t convey the solidity and perfection of movement and poise in the three-dimensional sculptures or the accuracy of line in the pictures, collage and drawings, or the subtlety of colouring apparent in all the pieces. They need to be seen as originals. If you respond to, and can chose to own, one of Sadie’s pieces, it will grow in your sight and enrich a living space indefinitely.
Prof. Michael Shaw