PROCESS: Sabrina Osborne creates intricate assemblages from objects and 'discards' collected from the streets, including animal eggs to create. The work is experimental because of the materials used and the difficulty in both finding and using said materials.
Osborne's work elicited the following commentary in a review, "Sabrina’s ‘opaque ensembles’ can hardly be separated from the cultures of everyday life. Through intensive laboring and layering, diverse materials conjoin in the making of private chambers for a fading memory. The first encounter is indeed baffling and intriguing, for her work instantly conveys the inscrutability of seeing and reading the imagery created primarily by the use of recycled materials and discards. As she goes through a particularly reflective phase in her life caught in the dualities of diagnosis and prognosis, her works reveal the vulnerability of the mind and the inner contradictions and riddles that she keeps asking herself. The act of remembering reinforces the human tendency to forget.
"Driven by her longing to hold on to memories that are evanescent and slippery, she has been creating repositories in the form of miniature storehouses that now resemble compact jewellery boxes with their red chenille covering, symbolizing the preciousness of what is safe-vaulted within. Sabrina is an alchemist at work, desiring magical transformations. For a decade or more, she has been working with found objects, discards, memorabilia that she accumulates and assembles together, to perhaps touch upon lost meanings and associations. She has always been receptive to the use of humble materials, often picked up from streets, old trunks, or abandoned by nature. They're very dysfunctionality, even physical abuse, qualifies them for their resurrection as she negotiates the possibility of restorative strategies. Whether natural or culturally manufactured, these fragments are put to scrutiny by this acutely sensitive mind seeking metaphors from the little nothings of daily life. It seems inevitable that she broke away from traditional realism to incorporate actual objects and fragments in her art making."