School of Fine Art / Sculpture & Environmental Art / Sasha Opit

Sasha Opit

(She/Her)

Sasha Opit is a Scottish artist, currently living and working in Glasgow. Her mixed media practice involves a strong sculptural and photographic interest that weaves contemporary and historical influences, making work that calls for interaction and disruption of space. A key concept embedded in Sasha’s work is the generational impact of displacement from ancestral lands, a notion discovered when reflecting on her own cultural history. This attributes to an exploration of coercively transitory borders and identity within that division. A rustic aesthetic derived from dilapidated rural structures informs these ideologies whilst also preserving Scotland’s history of injustice. Her work and creative values seek to further discussion of humanity’s interaction with land in relation to current land and political discourse within the country and the wider UK.

Contact

sasha.opit@gmail.com s.opit1@student.gsa.ac.uk

Links

Sashaopit.com

School of Fine Art / Sculpture & Environmental Art / Sasha Opit / Bratach nan Croitearan (The Crofters’ banner)

Bratach nan Croitearan (The Crofters’ banner)

Wood, dye-sublimation print, textile, stone.

‘Bratach nan Croitearan‘ takes its name from a protest poem written in 1885 by Dòmhnall MacDhòmhnaill. Found within the compilation ‘Tuath is Tighearna (Tenants and Landlords)‘, the book gathers expressive writings by Gaelic poets during the Highland Clearances and Land Agitation. These cultivated tools of defiance are channelled through my installation work as I seek to further the Land Question within a sculptural and contemporary setting.

A palisade-like fence plays the role of division as it cuts through the space, enforcing movement between opposing sides. The face of the barricade presents images of the poignant consequences of displacement, embodied in Orcadian and Sutherland ruins. The back of the structure features a subtler presence of Land Agitation with a photographic series of Southern Scottish sheep fanks, a destructive symbol of English industrial farming practises imposed onto the Scottish landscape.