Sasha Ballon (b.1996) is a Canadian/British visual artist currently working in Glasgow. Sasha graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2022 in Painting and Printmaking. Prior they studied film and theater in Vancouver, BC, unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Sasha explores themes of queer intimacy, the poetics of strength and softness, and ecological narratives. Their practice is the meeting point of craft and trade. Sasha uses collage to incorporate moving image, performance, textiles, installation and sculpture. She places craft as a site of resistance: inherently queer for its potential to upend categorical ways of making. She brings the physical act of craft into a digital context through manipulation of archival video.
Weaving and textiles acts as a metaphor for physical strength in softness. Sasha combine welding, chainsaw wood carving, and tapestry weavings to compare soft and industrial processes. Chainsaw carvings take on figurative qualities while never being exact replicas. It’s within performances where the figurative objects come into being and life.
Sasha uses a world-making approach to build characters which are placed into environments to explore. Within performances they engage with narratives of fear/desire/pleasure/power. The performances function as movement collages which uses the body as an extension of sculpture. These movement collages follow a looping structure which uses failure and dysfunctional movement patterns to test the limits of what the body is capable of.
Photography: Daniel Junqueira