Halifax artist Sara Hartland-Rowe builds shifting narratives using collaged images to survey humanity’s conduct. Hartland-Rowe collects poignant or troubling photographs from newspapers to use as source material for her drawings—a toddler dressed as a suicide bomber, a crouching child distressed by famine, a man in underwear aiming an assault rifle. In Sparrow in Midwinter (2015), approximately half of Hartland-Rowe’s protagonists are sketched by the artist on her travels—to, in the present case, Mississauga—or as she moves through Halifax as a commuter, sits in public spaces, or pauses to record events in her workday. Here, HartlandRowe’s subjects go about routine activities such as shopping, walking, and conversing.
Hartland-Rowe draws in ink on transparent, pastel-tinted scraps of polyester organza that maintain the intimate sketchbook scale of her initial drawings. Her unadorned gesture drawings are organized into overlapping groupings to shared formal properties—for example, all the figures are theatrically gesturing with their hands—or narrative possibilities—a child is seen running past an armed soldier.
From the decidedly local and terrestrial, we move on to the other drawn and painted elements in Sparrow in Midwinter that articulate a contemporary moral dilemma in broadly metaphoric terms. The artwork’s principal motif is an arc of coins falling and spinning across the wall from left to right. This balletic tumble signifies the ‘heads or tails’ nature of fate, the role of chance in determining such grand binaries as success or failure, abundance or scarcity, salvation or purgatory. The ellipses of the foreshortened coins are drawn with dextrous assurance using willow charcoal and a string anchored by pins at two fixed points; then, the coins are given form with layers of painted and offset printed watercolour, which allows destiny an evanescent, even seductive quality that the wall work’s many diminutive protagonists seem perfectly oblivious to. Through this seemingly purposeful kingdom of prosaic activity stylized wind forms blow. The artist thinks of this wind as omnipresent aether.