Sarah Fuller
Canada
ARTIST BIO
Sarah Fuller is a settler-Canadian artist of Icelandic and British descent who works in photography, video and installation. She has been an artist in residence at Sointula Art Shed, Skaftfell and Ströndin Studio, Iceland, the Ós Residency in Blönduós, Iceland, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Laughing Waters in Nillumbick Shire, Australia, the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (KIAC), Yukon, Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Italy, and the Association of Visual Artists (SIM), Iceland.
Sarah holds an MFA from the University of Ottawa and a BFA from Emily Carr University. Recent exhibitions include Submersed Landscapes at Gallery 881 (2025), Remold at the C2 Centre for Craft (2024), Aesthetic Paralysis at Deluge Contemporary (online) (2024), and Redesigning Paradise at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies with artists Mary Anne Barkhouse, Dianne Bos and Penelope Stewart (2023).
Sarah’s work is in public and private collections including the Canada Council for the Arts Art Bank, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Walter Phillips Gallery, the Indie Photobook Library and Global Affairs Canada.
PROJECT STATEMENT
“In Submersed Landscapes, I’m engaged with the idea that the ecosystem has agency, and that a rendering of the land can be expressed not only as an image, but also revealed chemically through its materiality in a photographic process.
In this series, I wanted to use elements that responded to the actual environment I was photographing in so I worked with a technique called ‘film souping’. Water from the Athabasca glacier was combined with charcoal from a controlled burn and Labrador Tea leaves to create a film soup. I then submerged a roll of 35mm film with images taken at higher altitudes at Plain of Six Glaciers & Lake Louise (Banff National Park), the Athabasca Glacier (Jasper National Park) and the Rockwall Trail ( Kootenay National Park). I used Lomo Purple and Lomo Turquoise 35mm film for this work, two films known for strange purple, pink and turquoise hues. In my work these tones are altered and exaggerated through both the film souping process and post-production.
Over the last 20 years, I have witnessed the change in the mountains due to climate change – from rapidly melting glaciers in the alpine to increased summer heat and extreme forest fires. The day after I collected water from the Athabasca Glacier in 2024, the town of Jasper was hit by a massive forest fire and the Park was evacuated.
With this work, I am thinking about the ways that glacial melt, forest fires, and alpine flora can interact with images of the land affected by these same processes of destruction and regeneration . The results are surreal, quasi-psychedelic imagery that feature the chemical imprint of the ecosystem on the emulsion itself.” – Sarah Fuller
