"I find them so alluring, almost like perfume bottles or snow globes, but so grotesque, she explains as we handle the etched and sculpted objects, which each have a precious drop of crude oil at their centre. They have these shiny, dazzling exteriors, but when you get close you see the death mulch inside. All presentations of power are fragile; they collapse once you get close enough."
"The work in Morale Patch is ostensibly an about-turn for the 29-year-old, Plymouth-born artist known for tactile works using pigment drawn from soil and materials soaked in the ocean. But it initially stemmed from her perennial preoccupation: the narrative power of organic materials, in this case crude oil. It's death matter: the product of marine bodies and prehistoric plants pressurised under the ground, Sasraku says, but it unleashes as a life force; it explodes out of the ground and powers human development."
Tanoa Sasraku assembles paperweights produced by oil companies, each containing a drop of crude oil beneath etched and sculpted exteriors that juxtapose dazzling beauty with 'death mulch' at their centre. The paperweights, drawn from oil-producing nations worldwide, are displayed on velvet-lined jewellery boards arranged as a map of global oil production and conflict, suggesting that petro-power is fragile and contingent. The series, Morale Patch at the ICA in London, links crude oil's origins in ancient organic matter to its role as a destructive yet generative force. Sasraku researched Scottish oil sites after relocating there in 2024 and sourced objects through auctions, including eBay bidding wars.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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