Artist: Tanoa Sasraku

Morale Patch is a new commission by Tanoa Sasraku (b. 1995, Plymouth) featuring process-driven works on paper, found objects, and sculpture. In this solo exhibition, Sasraku examines the seductive and destructive power of oil – its ties to war and national identity – through the mediation of emblems and mementos.

The multifaceted exhibition demonstrates Sasraku’s rigorous and adaptive practice, showcasing her ability to harness the evocative power of materials for both their narrative resonance and aesthetic force. Working across sculpture, printmaking, drawing, textiles and installation, Sasraku’s hybrid practice is rooted in the material and symbolic properties of land through landscapes, pigments, and minerals, and informed by a personal relationship to textiles and patternmaking. With Morale Patch, Sasraku turns her attention to oil: its materiality, fetishisation, and its role in geopolitics, nationalism, and the economy.

For this exhibition, Sasraku has collected a series of corporate trinkets in the form of paperweights produced by oil companies. These acrylic blocks each encase a small amount of crude oil sourced from extraction sites around the globe – from the snowy oil fields of Siberia and Alaska to the deserts of Texas and Saudi Arabia and the waters of the Scottish North Sea. The strange and highly designed objects boast slogans of success and picture their origin landscapes. Repurposed into a monumental, tiled display for the lower gallery, Sasraku reconfigures them within a conceptual chess game offering a meditation on extraction, pride, and empire.

A new series of works on paper examine military and national emblems, the symbols that distil complex and often devastating histories into condensed forms that can be worn, memorialised, or celebrated as individual achievement. Service ribbons honouring the War on Terror, the Gulf War’s “Liberation of Kuwait”, Prisoners of War, among others, are each rendered in muted, UV-printed patterns on thick stacks of newsprint which warp and ripple from the artist’s printing process. These materials, evocative of administrative bureaucracy, speak to the faded ideals and the aesthetics of power.

The largest of these works addresses the American flag. The iconic stripes (though not the stars) have been burned into the paper using UV light, creating an image that emerges from the natural tone of the newsprint itself. The image, like the material used to make it, is unstable: it will fade over the course of the exhibition.

In the rear gallery, a series of new sculptures continue Sasraku’s enquiry into the intersection of oil and nationalism. Two sets of fabricated acrylic paperweights loosely resemble miniature military coffins. Each set references a site of war and/or oil extraction: one topped with a screen-printed Scottish flag placed over a North Sea landscape (Sasraku currently lives and works in Glasgow); another draped with an American flag laid across a desert terrain.

As attuned to natural processes and conditions as she is to the nuanced historical contexts of her subjects, Sasraku’s work remains porous to the circumstances of its display. The UV-printed works on paper will gradually fade over time, while the national and military symbols they depict shift in meaning depending on audience perception and the volatility of geopolitical context. Sasraku’s interest lies in how complex events, individual and national glory, and militaristic rationale can be pinned to everyday symbols and souvenirs, and how materials themselves carry narrative and emotional weight.

A publication will accompany the exhibition and feature a conversation between Tanoa Sasraku and Fiona Banner, and texts by Susan Schuppli, Chiorstaidh Black, Pip Laurenson and Libby Ireland, among others.