Sarra Grillo-Henry

We live in a world of unspoken rules and rituals, and with my work, the aim is to question these customs and allow the viewer to do so too. Simply by offering a new perspective on mundane objects and concepts. Simple works often intend to humour the audience with a play on words or diverted thought. I have repurposed and reused my own work for a while now and I feel that it allows me to revisit the way I once thought about a piece and add my current views and ideas. My artistic process appropriates and plagiarises objects and myself.

My practice has always been diverse when it comes to the ideas and themes I work with. Although various aspects of my work are altered or manipulated, some of the items used will not be new to the viewer as my work includes everyday objects that they will have seen in their day-to-day lives. Conversely, I would hope that my work gives the viewer something to contemplate and discuss. Moreover, with the work not being massively detached from what the viewer already knows and has interacted with, I expect that this work will give the viewer a fresh, new way of viewing and questioning the social norms that are so deeply ingrained in our society’s way of living.

My current project looks at social norms and constructs that govern the way we live as a society. This laborious, monotonous repetition of casting processes comments on the routine happenings of neurotypical people. As a neurodiverse person, I am very aware of the way most people live. I spent years masking - learning, practicing, and performing certain behaviours in order to be more like the people around me. This has also acted as a mode of research of these social constructs that now inform my art work. This goes both ways as it is also observing the way autistic people use routine and special interests to self soothe. There is something very calming for me in having a safe process or method for doing anything.

For me, the repetition seen within my work acts as a self-soothing process. I am directly accessing or referencing the phenomena of ‘special interests’. Special interests are a common occurrence in autistic individuals where the individual becomes fixated on a specific action, interest or topic. I would say mine is art and within that it presents as an infatuation with certain objects or materials. When making art, the process is more emotive than the result. I thoroughly enjoy the making of the work and the accumulation seen thereafter is simply a proof of the process.