Sasha Sykes

Sasha Sykes works between Dublin and Carlow. With a background in architecture, she has exhibited her artworks and furniture pieces extensively in Ireland and abroad, and they are included in many notable private and public collections. An exploration of the cycle of life and decay, and the dichotomy of fragility and preservation, are central to her practice.

Her work is handmade using acrylic and resins to explore, manipulate, and challenge the material language of the natural world through the embedding of plants, flowers, algae and fungi she collects directly from the landscape. She feels that working with plants allows her to reveal a multi-layered story: the constantly changing colours, shapes and textures, the relationships with locality, habitat, landscape and environment… the history, the mythology and medicinal qualities of the natural world. The foraging for these raw materials itself is meditative and ceremonial: each plant differs day to day, year to year, and the memory of those circumstances also feed into the finished work. The combination of the natural habitat and man’s influence shape and colour everything in our world, and expressing the nature of that interaction is an important focus of her practice.

Sasha Sykes applied for a Golden Fleece Award to allow her to take time away from more commercial commissions-based work to create a new, more environmentally sustainable body of work for an upcoming exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy that will explore our relationship with the land and the sea. This work will test the use of natural polymers and bio-resins derived from carrageen seaweeds.