<-

Sadie Whelan (b.1999 in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa) lives and works on Gadigal Land (Sydney), Australia. Whelan works within a cross-disciplinary practice using methodologies of playfulness and disobedience as both material and subjective frameworks. Her work likes to pick and pull at things, breaching the surface. Whelan is interested in how value is assigned to materials and objects; how things become coded as tasteful or tasteless, precious or disposable, complete or failed. Her works often emerge from the residue of studio processes, second-hand economies, and accumulations of everyday matter.

She activates a magpie-like tendency to collect trashy, dishevelled, and femme material; think Kmart, fake eyelashes, council clean up, and being ‘tragic’. Whelan’s works build narrative and material relations from scraps; engaging with things that are ad-hoc and off-kilter, as opposed to tight, packaged or palatable. Whelan’s works have a sort of collective-personal history of girlhood that is nipping at their heels; mischievously investigating the ability of women to contain multitudes and sense-of-self as a curated collection.

The deviant and gurlesque nature of her work frustrates rigid regimens of taste and investigates unfixed and ungovernable bodies, femme rituals of self-display, and the tension between covering up versus revealing all. An irreverent remix of a material saviour complex, formal disobedience and autobiographical overlaying; painterly poeticism meets corrupted sculpture meets object poems meets being a girl and a sentimental hoarder.


email: sadiewhelan7@gmail.com 
instagram: sadie_whean