Sarah crowEST, Creeping Up On The Whitechapel 2024, oil, ink on birch panel, 60 x 50 cm, (plus Dub Freight Studio Cloth). Image courtesy of Gallery 9 and the artist.

In this body of work crowEST makes non-schematic blotches on sparse grids derived from a painting protocol limiting her actions to seven moves. It began as an attempt to quell her endlessly expanding, experimental diversionary approach to all things and maintain a steady beat in the face of overwhelm.

This is underpinned by an ongoing procedural approach that has an affinity with Jamaican and British dub music from their formative teenage years in the 1970s.

In an aesthetic of dissipation, isolated graphic elements echo and reverberate across the surfaces of the paintings. Semi-erasures (where parts of the painting are muted, faded or redacted) contrast with abrupt or boosted interventions. Diagrammatic forms or background grids move in and out of the mix, appearing and disappearing over intermittent imaginary backbeats. A simultaneous dissolution and distillation of meaning gestures toward a score for some sparse noises yet to come.

The quotes and anecdotes on the back are drawn from the artist’s archive of academic theses, collected quotes and personal memories and confessions. They can be apprehended as notes for a non-fiction text that may coalesce into a book.