Sarah CrowEST

Born 1957, London, UK

Sarah CrowEST's video works could be seen as a series of harshly funny parodies of an artist at work, desperate to succeed. She performs most of her sketches as a character she refers to as Bobblehead, who has a large spherical head with big dots for the eyes and mouth. Equipped with mallet, chisel and a long evening dress, she carves facsimiles of her blob–like head from a block of plaster. Bobblehead also sticks a pin into the cuddly rounded forms of her misshapen cartoon anatomy until all the pastel–coloured body fluids have spilled out. The videos' accompanying vocal sounds, alternately slowed to guttural groans and speeded up to squeaky giggles, could serve as the sound track to either a horror movie or an episode of the Chipmunks.

Bobblehead has an alter ego, the sensibly bewigged and bespectacled Winifred, who embodies the earnestness of experimental art as she conducts her practice dressed in a white lab coat. She is impeccably organised while Bobblehead is impetuously messy. Together they span a range of references culled from TV and magazines: the cult of celebrity, the style of contemporary Japanese manga, scientific experiments, beauty product promotions, cooking demonstrations and extreme makeovers. Using these familiar visual languages CrowEST describes something more obscure: what it feels like to be an artist. 

Timothy Morell from his Samstag catalogue essay, Loose connections
 
2007 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship
2007 Independent Study Program, Maumaus Escola de Artes Visuais, Lisbon, Portugal
2004 Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours), University of South Australia, Adelaide 

Artist's website
http://www.sarahcrowest.com/