Trotter&Sholer is delighted to present and the world came apart, a solo exhibition by Lara Saget, curated by Sarah Darro.
What might our world look like through the eyes of a tree that has survived an ice age? Or from the perspective of tectonic plates, whose gradual movements have shaped the planet over hundreds of millions of years? Working across cast glass, copper alloy, carved granite, and sound, Saget challenges the limits of human perception, proposing alternative ways of understanding time, matter, consciousness and our place within the natural world. Her sculptures move between the intimate and the planetary, revealing a world in constant cycles of destruction, regeneration, and transformation. These investigations are informed by Saget’s Spiritual practice, which she recently deepened through a Master of Divinity. For Saget, artmaking and Spiritual inquiry are inseparable modes of exploring the nature of reality.
At the center of the exhibition is a sonic conversation between two luminous cast glass sculptures; one of an Ancient Judean Date Palm, a species revived from nearly 2,000-year-old seeds, and the other of a Joshua Tree, whose survival is increasingly threatened by climate change. Voiced by children, the trees converse about extinction, memory, and the origins of existence. Their exchange unfolds across an elastic sense of time, in which an ice age feels like yesterday and the entirety of human civilization amounts to a fleeting moment. With humor and childlike curiosity, their dialogue moves from questions of survival toward a more expansive understanding of consciousness and existence. The trees suggest that humanity, preoccupied with the material conditions of life, has forgotten its true nature as Spirit. By granting these ancient organisms voices and interior lives, Saget offers a playful yet searching meditation on awareness and humanity’s collective responsibility to the natural world.
These philosophical questions find a material counterpart in Saget’s ambitious sculptural experimentation. Her Seismic series comprises monumental stone and metal wall sculptures that translate NASA data on tectonic activity and volcanic systems into richly textured reliefs. Employing an innovative adaptation of lost-wax casting, Saget embeds wax into carved granite, constructs molds around each material, and pours molten copper alloy into the resulting cavities, fusing metal and stone into a single sculptural surface. The process demands a meticulous negotiation between extreme heat, material resistance, and structural integrity, as conventionally incompatible substances surrender their boundaries and become one. Here, oneness is not simply a philosophical proposition but a material reality, made tangible through the processes of artmaking.
The exhibition’s title evokes the ancient rupture of a once-unified world, but also the generative possibilities of coming apart. Saget offers a vision of a planet in constant transformation, where destruction and renewal are inseparable, and scientific inquiry and childlike wonder are equally vital and rigorous ways of understanding the world. Moving between the intimate scale of individual experience and the vast expanses of geological time, the exhibition evokes the “overview effect,” expanding our sense of perspective beyond the limits of individual existence to reveal a world in which nothing exists in isolation. Ultimately, and the world came apart suggests that seeing beyond the boundaries that divide us calls for greater awareness, compassion, and responsibility.
