Sarah Sproule

Sproule: pronounced [Sp -roll] or rhymes with roll

Sarah Sproule is an artist and cultural worker based in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. She holds a BFA in Studio Arts and a BA in Art History from McMaster University. She is a member of the Hamilton artist co-operative, The Assembly Gallery, and has worked as an arts administrator with a focus on public programming. Her work has been shown extensively nationally and internationally, most recently at Art Windsor-Essex in Windsor, Ontario; Tangled Art + Disability in Toronto; and the Grand Valley State University Art Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 2023, she received the Hamilton Arts Award’s Creator Award.

Working primarily with the casting process, using plaster, found objects, ceramics, and latex paint to create sculptural impressions of abstracted bodies. Her practice examines identity, disabilty, and embodiment through intersecting lenses of queerness, fat politics, and material transformation. Sproule’s work draws on the aesthetics of the ghost story to explore how domestic spaces become sites of both comfort and repression. Influenced by the concept of Heterotopia, first articulated by Michel Foucault, she approaches space as something that can simultaneously mirror and disrupt dominant cultural structures. Within her installations, the haunting within the home is reimagined as a physical manifestation that speaks to religious control, familial memory, and cultural anxiety surrounding bodily and spiritual transformation.