Sarah Contos: Eye Lash Horizon
17 October – 5 December 2026
Sarah Contos uses diverse materials and methods of making to weave together a tapestry of images and forms linked to her enduring interest in how art history, film, fashion, and popular culture inform our collective memories. Contos’s practice involves equal experiences of recognition and mystery where the porous fibres and surfaces of images and objects become animated, capturing histories, ideas, and emotions.
The exhibition presents two bodies of work first presented at UNSW Galleries in 2024. MoTH-eRR is an immersive video and sound installation inspired by German expressionist cinema. Using distinctive stylistic features, it explores the complexities and contradictions inherent in the human condition through the organ of the womb, exemplifying its duality as both a nourishing, life growing space and an abject, uncanny void. Generative software is used to manipulate and loop imagery together creating a hallucinogenic narrative unfolding across three chapters to explore childbirth as a speculative experience.
Cocoons and moults are recurring motifs in Contos’s practice and inspired by science fiction’s ability to conjure imagined worlds that express fear of the unseen and unknown.
Contos has created a series of large-scale plush cocoons and secreting moults collaged and adorned with fabrics, chains, buttons, images of teen idols, lights, mannequin hands, and vanity mirrors. The installation is a potent site for psychological change, an intimate space for holding memories and yearnings of the past while embracing the shedding required to nurture future dreams and desires.
A UNSW Galleries touring exhibition
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body, and the UNSW Galleries New Contemporaries Fund. Sarah Contos is represented by STATION, Naarm / Melbourne and Gadigal / Sydney.
image: Sarah Contos, Under Four Decades and Six Years of Bitten Transparent Fingernails, 2024, stainless steel, hand tufted acrylic and Australianwool fibres, plastic, printed transparency film, thread, safety pins, Photographer: Jacquie Manning, Courtesy Sarah Contos and STATION, Naarm /Melbourne and Gadigal / Sydney