Sara Hinks

The Driving Force Of Me...

Sara Hinks is an artist who makes work exploring her interest in the combination between where we’ve come from to where we might be going; from our origins of space dust to our ending, both now as dust and in the future as a race, with the changes to structure within the very dust that we all regenerate from. 

Sara has been exploring nano-plastics invading our being, paradoxically using plastic in her work to highlight its consumption. 

Sara’s processes of making include working with a variety of materials, ranging from using resin to make hollow balls with, to casting folded paper and creating resin bricks with a 3D surface. Both of which have been incorporated with the use of ultraviolet pigments, leading to striking results for both installation and imagery in photography and printing. 

Ultraviolet pigments have been used to reflect the use of some ultraviolet dyes in microbiology laboratory processes in identifying and studying nano-plastics as well as in general biology. 

There are subtle autobiographical elements included in her work by having added personal biological material to these building blocks, including her own hair and dust from around her home. Adding to the combination of natural versus plastic in our evolutionary building blocks. 

Sara uses various approaches to capture abstract imagery, from bursting balloons filled with pigment with a bow and arrow to melting an ice block with a blow torch. Exploring materiality is a key focus in her work, as well as her key theme of life, death, dust and plastic. 

The imagery Sara captures ranges from appearing in planetary forms, biological samples on slides, or aesthetically pleasing abstraction. All the images are captured from items made with or from plastic by Sara, having taken lengthy processes to create in themselves. Sara is drawn to making anything she works with from scratch, perhaps her own labor signifying energy and focus in life. 

Sara’s artwork is informed by research into the potential long-term implications of the introduction of nanoplastics into our own systems, as well as our ecosystem in a broader more general context.

She has been exploring the notion that we are plastic. 

​

​

​

​

Image : Resin Balloon One, Resin coated balloon with lighting, edited with photoshop, November 2019.