En Liang Khong is director of digital at ArtReview. His writing on politics and art has been published in the Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman
As a child, Tanoa Sasraku loved to wander the wetlands of Dartmoor, close to where she grew up in Plymouth. One day, while out on the moors, she lost her footing and fell into a bog – home, Sasraku found to her unpleasant surprise, to the rotting body of a horse.
But looking back on the encounter, the scene of decay is not one of horror, but of rebirth.
These days, Sasraku makes art out of nature: strange, uneasy collages, which she calls “terratypes”. These miniature studies tell stories of the landscapes from which they emerge, revealing their undulating rhythms of liquid, minerals and matter.
Sasraku’s method for making these artworks goes something like this: first, she begins with sheets of soft newsprint, and gently rubs them with pigments she has foraged on trips to the Jurassic Coast or the Highlands, until they are thoroughly smeared through with lovely ochres and umbers. Twenty or so of these pages are cut and stitched into ribbed, peaked patterns using a sewing machine.
In the spirit of her back-to-neolithic-basics artistry, Sasraku then returns to Dartmoor, where she soaks the papers in bog water, until their surfaces weather and warp. As the fabric dries out, striated lines of sediment appear. Look closely and you can see the wispy, dried-out fronds of bog matter.
Later, she tears into these layers, creating marbled rivulets within the folds. At Vardaxoglou Gallery in Soho, Sasraku’s terratypes hang in a jewel box of an exhibition across two cramped floors. It’s intimate and gestural. Art as alchemy.
You could read the saturated hues of Sasraku’s terratypes via histories of paint. For instance, red ochre, which Sasraku burrows out of the cliff-faces of Torbay in Devon, flushes through the works on show. Bloodied with hematite, it’s one of the world’s oldest pigments, first mixed up with bone and urine in seashells by the earliest cave painters to create their portraits of beast hunts and star charts.
Moving from terratype to terratype, you can take each pigment apart: from a deep ultramarine, bathed in the seawater of Plymouth Sound so that it takes on a mottled texture, to a sickly yellow-green clay foraged on the Isle of Skye, or a bold orange dye discovered within the iron salt-rich soils of Yarner Wood, once the site of a copper mine. These veins of colour show a remarkable eye for transposition and juxtaposition.
In her Mire Horse series – each piece assuming the abstracted form of an equine head (the animal’s mane shaped like a castle’s ramparts) – Sasraku has drenched newsprint in inky Biddie Black, a kind of carboniferous clay, the result of ferns fossilising over hundreds of millions of years, which she has foraged in Bideford in the north of Devon.
It’s a vegetal pigment that’s appeared in everything from tank camouflage during the second world war to Max Factor mascara. Here, it simply pools into a threatening expanse.
Another way of making sense of Sasraku’s terratypes might be to look at how they reclaim identity. The spiny tassels that frame the terratypes, formed from shallow cuts around their borders, are a callback to the similarly fissured fringes of the regimental flags of Ghana’s coastal Fante communities (and a nod to Sasraku’s late father’s roots).
Perhaps bringing her Ghanaian heritage into dialogue with British pastoralism is a way of forcing open the set of violent relations that often underpin notions of “pristine” nature.
But Sasraku’s terratypes deal in magic as much as they do in realism. The gentle geometries that emerge from their reworked pages evoke the circuitry of microchips, or the patterning of tartan (in tribute to her Scottish lover), as much as they do the tensions of ruralism. They are maps of the artist’s own restless mind’s eye.
There’s much to decipher. But at the heart of the terratypes lies a thornier question – one that runs across the history of art: how do you portray a landscape? Sasraku’s abstractions show us that when we talk about landscape we are, more often than not, talking about fidelity: choices over how we choose to reproduce or represent the details of the world around us.
The danger in mimicry, of course, is of overfilling the image to the point of estrangement. “The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory,” Neil Gaiman writes in his short story The Mapmaker. “The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.”
Perhaps that’s why it’s best not to overscrutinise the terratypes. Instead, before leaving the gallery, I leaned back. Seen as a sequence of dynamic pictures, you can follow the seams of pigment bleeding in and out of the windswept canvases. I thought of those ancient minerals weaving beneath my feet. And then, the moment passed.
Tanoa Sasraku was at Vardaxoglou Gallery, London, 14 October–17 December 2022
