Previous recipient of the prestigious Samstag scholarship and MFA graduate from the Chelsea College of Art in London, Perth artist Sarah Elson has conceived her most expansive body of work yet for a solo exhibition in PICA’s West End Gallery.

Sarah Elson’s practice involves making painstakingly intricate castings of small plant and insects; flower bulbs, leaves, burrs, cicadas and beetles. Her sculptures are often mounted on pins studded directly into the gallery walls like displaced specimens. Her interest in the politics of artifacts and materials and how value is perceived is developed in Elson’s laboratory-like use of PICA’s gallery by amassing together different metals, delicate casts and organic forms.