Sarah Caillard’s work is proteiform, consisting of drawings, photographs, sculptures, videos and installations. These different practices complement each other to create different levels of readings, temporalities and materialities within the work. 

Sarah explores the underlying mechanisms in our construction as individuals within a society and the roles that the imaginary plays in our perception of others and ourselves. Inspired by the philosophy of Bergson and Bachelard, Jungian psychoanalytical principles and an interest in metaphysics, esotericism and the “merveilleux”, she looks for narrative and/or visual motifs at work throughout history and which belong to the collective imagination. Those present in myths, legends... but also in contemporary entertainment and cultural phenomena. These motifs or patterns reveal sensitive codes that are transmitted to us without our knowledge and participate in our construction. Sarah sees them as ghostly figures that pass through us without ever belonging to us.  From these elements she builds a mythology where gestures, states, emotions and symbols become characters. 

This mythology unfolds into an atlas of figures of the otherness present in us, as many facets that define the individual as a multiple entity. These figures, mostly female or non-gendered, evolve in fictional and real-life narratives that explore the influences, sources, and imaginary and tangible references that represent them. Embodied in sculpture, these different figurative representations are not divisible from each other, but complement each other to evoke the complexity and plurality of being. Their physical and/or psychic presence is defined by the choice of their materiality: concrete, transparent resin, retro-reflective fabric (...) can thus represent different instances of the “self”. These figures evolve in phantasmagorical places and situations through drawings and videos. In these videos, models and installations are used as sets, and sculptures become props. She uses the aesthetics of everyday forms of expression (YouTube clips, Instagram stories) which she combines with low-fi special effects and DIY sets (such as green screen, inlay techniques, model making, costumes, etc.). She thus preserves the fragility of these gestures as much as their magical potential. 

These different processes are brought together in installations that designate a point of view to position the spectator as a witness, voyeur or seer.  Access to these different elements makes it possible to make visible the different readings of the same “object”, in the manner of a triple gaze: real, symbolic and phantasmagorical; as many positions and perceptions that inscribe a being in a fictitious relationship where it becomes the infinite subject of interpretations and projections.