Sarah Desmarais currently uses collage to create work inspired by her everyday domestic environments, which include her studio, kitchen, and allotment shed. She is drawn to the way the flotsam and jetsam of daily life remain in constant, disorderly movement, never ceasing to present themselves in new and surprising conjunctions. Rather than taking charge by setting up a still life, she allows herself to be surprised by this organic process. In doing so, the objects seem to carry on their own social lives, histories, and conversations.

For Desmarais, collage is a joyful, scrappy, and serendipitous bricolage, reminiscent of the way objects in her home—childhood books, chocolate sardines, paper bags, Johnston’s Railway Type—fall together by accident and often initiate a kind of dialogue. The act of cutting, pasting, and reassembling materials pulls things apart only to put them back together again. Bits of paper fall serendipitously onto—and also off—works in progress. In much the same way, perception dissects, selects, neglects, and cobbles things back together again, both to make daily life workable and to imagine new possibilities. Desmarais considers collage materials themselves to possess energy and agency—each found or cut piece, with its own history and social life, tells a story and contributes to the narrative of the whole. This perspective extends to the material world more generally. The idea of vibrant matter—as explored by American philosopher Jane Bennett—is particularly compelling: materials are not passive but rather possess a self-organizing force, pushing back against the intentions of the artist just as they do in all human interactions with the "stuff" of material life.

Unsurprisingly, she has a lifelong love of Cubism and its shattering of the visual field into multiple components and, thus, multiple viewpoints within a single composition. This deconstruction of perspective and form marked the beginning of a more psychological relationship with pictorial space, one that invites an acknowledgment that seeing is always an act of construction. The histories, subjective meanings, and functions of everyday objects significantly influence how they are perceived, as does, for instance, the understanding that a tabletop is rectangular, despite the distortions created by foreshortening. She is also deeply inspired by the emphasis on the domestic and the everyday in the work of the St Ives School, which captures the overlooked bits and bobs of daily life. This attention to what happens between ordinary objects fosters an awareness of the poetic possibilities of the mundane. Upon closer examination, everyday items—a postcard, a bradawl, a discarded tea towel take on an aura of the extraordinary. Through working with material objects in domestic environments, she seeks to evoke the subtle enchantment that underpins everyday life.

"To be enchanted is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and everyday." — Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001)

"World is suddener than we fancy it. World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural." — Louis MacNeice, Snow (1935)