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The leaflets next to the gallery door offering support for carers and for bereavement are an indication of the shattering power of Sarah Roberts’ new work.
Walking into Roberts’ latest installation, Sick (A Note from 40 Sandilands Road and Other Stories), viewers are hit with a disconcerting green, a colour that is supposed to be calming and healing but will resonate differently for those with experience caring for an ill or disabled family member, such as Roberts.
It was, she says, “that feeling of being out of step” that inspired this piece.
“Being between the sick and the well, it’s like I didn’t really fit in either of the camps. I think that’s what a lot of people with care experience will be experiencing. You’re not one or the other. You’re having this experience of a sick person, but it’s not yours.”
As a child, the artist was an on-and-off carer for her father, who became blind and died when she was 14. Her sister faced severe complications with diabetes – at one point being sectioned owing to a misdiagnosis of anorexia – that led to prolonged periods spent in hospitals.
“I didn’t think of myself as a young carer,” Roberts says. “I thought of myself as just someone who cares. It’s like, dealing with a urinal bedpan is one thing you do, and going to a rave is another.
“So I didn’t have this sad, non-joyous childhood. But there is always a shadow of care that you carry around on your back like a monkey. Sometimes a monkey is fat and heavy, and sometimes it’s cute, and it gives you some kind of resilience and buoyancy.”
Roberts is known for her striking installations, exhibited in London, Switzerland, Bristol, Southampton and Leeds, where she lives.
Perhaps most well known is Everything’s Mustard, a strikingly yellow overwhelm demanding to be engaged with, influenced by the process of clearing her dead mother’s bungalow.
Sick is more of the tantalising and uncanny style she has become known for. Visitors experience several rooms where hospitals, home and the outside world overlap.
Shiny, acid-green porcelain snakes sit on shelves and hang from rails, as if having slithered away from the Rod of Asclepius to contaminate a girl’s bedroom with its purple dolphins, sparkly stickers and cats.
A sickening blown glass vessel resembling a lung sits among other household objects. Jarring too is the 1990s soundtrack of songs such as You Gotta Be by Des’ree and Music Sounds Better With You by Stardust, edited to introduce glitches and punctuated by hospital sounds.
Absurd porcelain food creations lie around, inspired by cookbooks found in the University of Leeds’s archive. Roberts says: “A lot of them contain these really prescriptive guides on how to care for ‘invalids’ in terms of what to feed them, how to make it palatable. And some of the plates show these sculptural creations that I don’t know who would have the time to make, but it certainly wouldn’t have been carers in the 80s.”
It is a sense of seeing something that is only visible to the sick or what Roberts describes as the “sick-adjacent”, the physically well who live in close proximity with the medical world.
“I’m interested in how being in a position where you’re well-bodied, as a sick-adjacent person, you can feel a weird shame around a circumstance that is of no fault to anyone,” she says.
Sick combines the everyday with the escapist, in terms of Roberts’ imagined girlhood bedroom with bunk beds – which she always wanted but didn’t have – and insights into her literal escapes as a teenager, to the seaside amusement arcades of her home town, the mid-Wales seasonal resort of Tywyn.
The work is meticulously researched. She worked with the artist and weaver Hannah Robson to create jacquards resembling illustrations of the pneumonia virus from 1909 that Roberts found in the medical museum archive at Leeds University.
“You’re looking out of the window and seeing someone else’s Topshop dress blowing in the wind and just kind of wishing that you weren’t experiencing this intense level of poverty that often comes alongside these things. So there’s a lot of wanting for another experience and wanting for belonging.”
She adds: “There maybe is a moment of slight resentment when you have this kind of upbringing that has a shadow over it. But then at the same time, I’m aware that this practice totally comes from it.”
“[If it wasn’t for that experience] what would I have made work about?”
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Sick (A Note from 40 Sandilands Road and Other Stories) opens on Wednesday 2 April at the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery in Leeds, and runs until 19 July. Entry is free
