Since 2017, Sarah Craske has been working with Martin Kluge at the Basel Pharmacy Museum, recreating the polytemporal panacea, Theriac. Through this she is exploring themes of ecological balance, lost and embodied knowledges and the relationship between science, religion and magic. She works in the liminal, transdisciplinary space between art, science and technology. Her work explores the Anthropocene, through philosophical enquiry into our relationship with various forms of climate breakdown, drawing on specialist expertise and technologies, and taking part in research collaborations across the world. Craske exhibits in interdisciplinary places of histories, knowledge, narratives and context, including libraries, museums, and laboratories. Purposefully prioritising their rich contexts over white cube galleries, these sites, buildings and organisations provide materials to work with, and become an structural part of the work.
Recent works include Returning Shores, Healing Earth, THERIAK and Biological Hermeneutics, a new transdiscipline which was speculatively presented through a site specific installation at Chethams’ Library, Manchester, UK, the oldest public library in the English-speaking world. For THERIAK, she explored our relationship with disease across time, and framed within the context of current antimicrobial resistance. Works included a time-lapse film of cholera she had grown in a laboratory, being fought by her own synthetic peptides, and copperplate prints of the contemporary molecules she was working with. THERIAK was exhibited at the Basel Pharmacy Museum, Switzerland.
Recent awards include the Whitstable Biennale Jerwood Attachment, currently supporting a year of research and development; the John Ruskin Prize Shortlist, that identified her as an ‘Agent of Change’; an AHRC Science in Culture Innovation Award and a Biofaction artist-in-residence in Switzerland.
http://www.sarahcraske.co.uk/