SANNÉ MESTROM
BORN 1979
HEERLEN, THE NETHERLANDS
LIVES MELBOURNE, VICTORIA
Sanné Mestrom digests Modernist form by bringing it into a relation of restless contact with her own raw, vulnerable cast responses. She plays with the ghosts of sculptures past, welcoming them into her studio. The figurative sculptures that issue forth both enjoy and thoroughly question their historical lineage. In Mestrom’s hands the gravity of the Modernist period and the expansive heroism of Brutalism are revised in service of intimate, bodily gestures.
Like their Brutalist predecessors, Mestrom’s works proudly display the pockmarks and seams evident on their unpolished surfaces. Her rough-skinned concrete bodies achieve a balance between monumentality and humanism. Her relationship to the Modernist period is both critical and loving as she adopts and adapts their openness of form, generosity of scale and muscularity.
Untitled (Self Portrait, Underground), 2017
concrete, steel, bronze
Untitled (Self Portrait, Known), 2018
concrete, steel, bronze
Made during her first pregnancy, Sanné Mestrom fragmented her own body by casting it into metal and concrete parts. The resultant work reflects Mestrom’s view that the female body is a contested realm, with its privacies ruptured by childbearing.
‘Most of me is stowed away from the public eye, seen barely even by myself except in the dim lights of nightfall, or glimpsed through a foggy morning mirror… in the process of bringing another life into the world, our fiercely guarded bodies are suddenly no longer our own.’
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