Sapphire Goss is an artist who works with moving image, photography and other lens-based methods. Using obsolete technologies she creates chimerical imagery using unexpected materials, looping and processing to make an ‘analogue uncanny’: grainy, shimmering, otherworldly; bursts of light and emotion; moving and mysterious. Using hybrid material processes: antique glass, paper, liquid lenses or real plants, inputs from public contributors, multiple channels that feedback in endless combinations or sound/data responsive elements - she creates work that grows, lives and decays beyond the surface, beyond the edge of the frames and the looking glass of the image.
Goss' work has been shown widely in exhibitions and events including the Barbican, Tate Exchange, By Art Matters Hangzhou, Fermynwoods Contemporary, Brighton Museums, Milton Keynes Art Centre, East End Film Festival, and Maysles Centre New York. She has received multiple commissions and several awards, including Arts Council Developing Your Creative Practice award for her project Attic Windows of the Infinite. In 2018 she was the recipient of ACE funding for the large-scale multimedia project Eternity City. She was selected for Live Cinema UK’s National Talent Pool in 2018. Her video, photography, research and writing work has been featured in performances, events, commissioned for a variety of platforms and used for commercial content and music videos.
“Goss’s work shares the spirit of the Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety, who called cinema “magic in the service of dreams.” Each video of hers is a reinvention of cinema and a reminder of the magic inherent in the medium. Often working with analogue or even expired film and using homemade lenses to feature the repetitive textures of water, light, erosion, and other ecological materials and processes, Goss manages to create video art that is both wholly new and utterly infused with material history.”
Darran Anderson in the Yale Review, winter 2023 issue.
"The works explore the stagnation of time and the dissociation between memory and illusion, but also form a collision between distance and rhythm, constructing a drifting and blurred dream, guiding us to shuttle between the tangible and intangible, time and space."
Exhibition notes: To the Past, to the Future, By Art Matters Hangzhou
