Your Absence is Mineral - Closing Reception

Date:

Tue, Oct 6th, 2026

Time:

6:00 pm to 8:00 pm

Description:

Your Absence Is Mineral is a solo exhibition by Vancouver-based artist Sarah Steeves, marking the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition.

Steeves’s work rings with a subtle but persistent truth: humans are not separate from the Earth; we are intrinsically linked to it. The exhibition includes ten sculptures, a video work, and a durational installation. Steeves weaves intricate pieces of copper into textile-like forms, which are then immersed in a saline mixture and left to crystallize. These mineral interventions—specifically salt crystallization—reproduce processes of geological weathering that elicit transformation. By mirroring the ways natural forces break down rock, the work draws a parallel to how humans experience psychological weathering through accumulated grief and trauma.

At the heart of the exhibition is an exploration of grief, loss, and transformation. For Steeves, absence is not a void but a shifting into another form. The exhibition title takes inspiration from Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s novel Your Absence Is Darkness , a saga about an isolated rural community in Iceland. Steeves gently pushes back against the notion of absence as darkness, instead proposing something more materially grounded: mineral. Her title reflects a belief that we are so deeply interconnected with the Earth’s systems that nothing truly disappears, but instead transforms.

Titles also play an important role throughout Steeves’s practice. Using geological naming conventions often employed by researchers to catalogue discoveries, Steeves creates coded references to her own personal world and artistic influences. These subtle naming systems act as quiet gestures toward memory, place, and lineage.

Integral to the exhibition is an evolving installation in which viewers can observe the salt crystallization process unfold over the course of the exhibition. The sculptures become simultaneous representations of erosion and creation, inviting viewers to witness slow, almost imperceptible change over time.

Through this durational process, Your Absence Is Mineral offers a contemplative space to consider transformation, interconnectedness, and the cyclical nature of life. The work suggests that creation and erosion are not opposites, but part of the same continuous process of becoming.

Sarah Steeves would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for its support in making this exhibition possible.

Artist Biography

Sarah Steeves is a Canadian sculptor working on the unceded, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwxw̱u7mesh and səliQ lwətaʔɬ peoples. She centres her practice on the loom, a traditional tool she approaches in unconventional ways, weaving with fine strands of copper which she then treats with naturally occurring geologic materials. Through this durational process, the work explores how internal states shift and find new form through external pressures, eliciting a meditation on the interconnectedness between the biologic self and geologic transformation. Steeves holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University Montreal, and her work has been exhibited across Canada, the United States and France. https://www.sarahsteeves.com/

Photo credit: Rachel Topham Photography

Venue:

Vernon Public Art Gallery

Address:
3228-31st Avenue, Vernon, V1T 2H3

Cost:

By Donation

Ticketing and/or registration:

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