Sarah Casey: Drawing on the Cusp of Visibility

Hi Sarah, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your practice?

Hello, I’m Sarah Casey. I’m an artist who works mainly though drawing, although it’s a kind of sculptural drawing. I work by manipulating materials to try to convey the feeling of the subjects. What it might feel like to see or touch them. I often work with waxed paper, folding or piercing to draw attention to the fragile materiality of the paper surface.

I am drawn to phenomena that are on the cusp of visibility – things that are in the process of appearing or disappearing. For a long time, my work has been concerned with ideas of preservation – working with curators and conservators of museum objects. But over the past five years I became interested in glacial archaeology – that is objects that are emerging out of ice which has preserved them for maybe a hundred or even a thousand years.

Your exhibition is titled ‘Negative Mass Balance’ – could you explain what it means?

The title Negative Mass Balance is a term borrowed from glaciology. It refers to the health of a glacier – a glacier in negative mass balance is one that is losing more ice than it gains. I chose the title as it also seemed to fit with the ideas of presence that appears through absence and precarious ecological equilibrium.

Could you tell us about your installation Emergency! What Was Is?

Emergency! What Was Is are long translucent drawings made with waxed paper. They are 5.5 metres long and hang from near the ceiling, cascading to the floor where the paper is crumpled up. The material looks a bit like ice. The surface is pierced through with tiny pin-pricks, creating outline image fragments of glacial archaeology. The pin-pricks let light into the room.

As you move towards the work, the light will change and different parts of the image will be illuminated. So the drawings are kind of alive, in a kind of dialogue with the viewer in the room and changing with the light outside.

Nestled into the crevices made by the waxed paper are some tiny paper objects and traces of dust made with glacial flour – the sediment that is deposited as the glacier retreats.

How did this installation come about?

Emergency! What Was Is is a development of the works I’ve been making with wax, depicting objects of glacial archaeology. I work with wax because it is sensitive to heat – like ice and archaeology, it’s sensitive to environmental conditions. For example, it will melt and disintegrate if it gets too hot.

For context, I should say that I have been working with wax drawings outdoors at some of the glacial sites in Switzerland where the archaeology has been found and watching as the sun leaves its trace on the surface, erasing the drawing.

However, for this work, I’ve tried to make the environment affect the work in a different way, using light. The qualities of the waxed paper look very much like ice.

What is glacial archaeology and how did it inspire this exhibition?

Glacial archaeology is the study of human artefacts preserved in ice – in Europe, this is in high mountain areas, in glaciers or more typically ice patches. It is important because in this cold, dry environment, fugitive organic materials, such as textiles, leather and hair, can survive for many thousands of years. They are found not in the ground, but on it, as the ice around them melts away. Finds like these are exceptionally rare, providing evidence of some of the earliest textile cultures in Europe. However once exposed to the air, these delicate materials are vulnerable to decay; they quickly disintegrate and are lost.

Unlike terrestrial archaeology, glacial archaeology does not follow usual stratigraphic rules where the newest objects lie closest to the surface: Ice is a moving, shifting being. It is an unruly and uncanny archive of the past. Twentieth century finds may emerge right next to something ten times their age. The only way to be sure is to use radiocarbon dating.

There are also two little watches mounted on the wooden stands – can you tell me more about them?

They are from the Ice Watch series. When we look closely, we can see the image of a mountain landscape – but it is very pale and not visible at all angles. However, the light passes through the glass and casts a shadow of the image on the white surface of the wooden stand.

Can you describe the process and concept behind the Ice Watch works?

The watch faces have been painted with glacial flour and scored into the images of glacial environments I visited while working with the archaeologists in Switzerland in 2023. The glacial flour is fine rock powder that is made by the action of the glacier moving over rock, scouring it down. When the glacier melts, this fine powder is left behind. I realised that like archaeology this is another appearance from ice loss and began to work with it.

Painted onto the glass it becomes a negative space drawing – imagine it like a stencil, selectively letting light through to cast a shadowy image of the mountain landscape that is drawn on the glass. It’s like the shadow is the ghost of that landscape, which seems appropriate given that these images of the glacial sites, as I saw them in 2022 or 2023, are actually already views of the past.

There are also the Ablations risographs on the wall – can you tell me what they are and how they interact with time and change?

The Ablations series of risographs comes from documentation of ‘drawing experiments’ where I exposed a group of wax drawings at glacial sites in Valais, Switzerland. I wanted to see how the alpine sun would affect their surface – to record the impact of heat through erasure. Just as a drawing captures the trace of an action, so too can its disappearance. And it really did – quite fast in some cases.

The risographs are printed in golden-coloured ink, giving them a sepia tone like a faded photograph or old newspaper. But the reflective ink makes them shift in and out of visibility as the viewer moves. Most strikingly, the plant-based ink – like watercolour – will slowly fade over time, physically showing the fragility of both the ice and archaeology.

What message do you hope visitors take away from it?

I hope that when visitors come to see the work, they find a quiet space where they can notice some of the tiny subtle details, how their movement affects the work making it invisible. It’s actually quite playful.

Find out more about Sarah’s work in the exhibition Sarah Casey: Negative Mass Balance, on display at Henry Moore Institute from 4 April until 22 June 2025.