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I want the eye to travel along colour and form and perspective.
Sara Hughes

Sara Hughes is a heat-seeking device, an artist in search of a pulse in this digitally-enhanced, computer-generated, imaged-downloadable age. With her abstract wall works of collaged commercial vinyl brightly coloured by consumerism, Hughes calls attention to the connective impulses underlying contemporary life. Her suggestive swirls and painted pixelations illustrate our competing urges to consume or be consumed, for instant gratification or more serious satiation, to delineate or decode visual language. With patterns that seem to proliferate randomly as if from a computer program, her site-specific works ask us to search for the unifying mark of the human hand.

Earlier this decade, while enrolled in painting at Auckland's Elam School of Fine Arts, Hughes became intrigued by the Victorian figure of Ada Lovelace, who worked on Charles Babbage's analytical engine and is credited as the world's first data programmer. Soon computer-cut dots began colonising gallery walls in shifting shades of grey. As the 2003 Frances Hodgkins Fellow in Dunedin, the artist next turned her attentions to the history of the paisley print, which Hughes traced from precolonial India to a collection of Victorian shawls in the local museum. In the resulting vinyl wall work Love me tender, 2003, the Scottish-named design mutates into hairy critter-like shapes, a pretty postcolonial plague.

Having recently returned from American residencies in New York and Charlotte, Hughes's latest work is patterned by different social forces. In 'Scales of Economy', her July 2008 show at Auckland's Gow Langsford Gallery, candy-coloured number paintings whoosh and whirl, leaving a bittersweet aftertaste. Could this be the inflationary freefall unleashed by the subprime mortgage crisis? Hughes's American visit also coincided with the Democratic primaries, and the recent Christchurch Art Gallery commission, United we fall, 2008, decodes colour as a political tool. The 2000-panel work placed in and around the lobby stairs recontextualises the various colours of the United Nations' 194 recognised flags, with the eye reading these as patterns of potency (needless to say, red predominates). Hughes says she is fascinated by pattern 'in the widest possible meaning of that word in terms of ways of understanding and navigating the world'...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Summer 2008 issue.