Sarah Illenberger is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Berlin working at the intersection of art, graphic design, and photography. With a focus on analog craftwork using everyday items, Sarah is renowned for creating vivid, witty images that open up new perspectives on seemingly familiar subjects. Her ability to transform ordinary materials into complex and unexpected visual experiences has been utilized to develop concepts for clients from the fields of culture and business in several countries. In her aim to explore the fertile overlap between art and design, she’s collaborated with numerous photographers and artists, and filled exhibition spaces with self-initiated projects in Paris, Tokyo, and Berlin.
The visual language of Sarah Illenberger is extremely effective at translating content, data, and ideas into vivid, often humorous images. Whether big or small, abstract or complex, the subjects and problems of our times are pointedly depicted by this renowned illustrator and designer in concise visual forms. The conceptual strength, descriptive intensity, and spatial finesse of her style make her work particularly attractive for international magazines that are looking for a catchy and entertaining way to illustrate their articles. Meticulously created with analog handicraft using simple materials and household items such as paper, food, textiles, and wood, Illenberger’s richly detailed work opens up new perspectives on seemingly familiar, iconographically-charged forms and content. She expertly avoids imbuing her materials and subjects with artificial significance or forcing a meaning upon them. Instead, Illenberger’s penetrating creative eye reveals their true essence—one that has usually remained hidden just under the surface from our fleeting and routine everyday glances. The Japanese word for fireworks is hanabi--hanameaning “flower” and bi meaning “fire.” Sarah Illenberger only recently learned this, but it’s a fitting coincidence because she’s spent the last year making flowers “explode” in her studio. With a little lighting and ingenuity, her vibrant photos take floral arrangement to a new level. The idea for Flowerwork came to her while walking through a flower shop in Berlin, where she lives. The rainbow of colors and various blooming shapes immediately reminded her of fireworks splintering in the sky. “It was like one of those moments where you’re stuck by lightning. I immediately knew this was the idea I’d been looking for,” she says. |
To make these flowers of fire, Illenberger studied firework patterns before scouring flower shops and markets. She eventually filled her studio with flora of all shapes, sizes and colors and spent hours arranging them. Some arrangements came together easily, while others had to be painstakingly assembled. To make the flowers look like they were exploding, Illenberger or her assistant would gently shake or tip the backdrop to create a motion blur. Then she photographed the arrangement a second time as still life and combined the images digitally to give them extra oomph.
All the lighting was done with a flashlight and the exposures often took 30 seconds. What appears to be smoke is actually the flashlight moving across the backdrop, which was patched together with several kinds of material and black tape. The process was a big experiment. “Making it all work involved a lot of trial and error,” Illenberger says. The photographer wasn’t trying to trick the eye. Illenberger likes that the arrangements obviously resemble fireworks, but it’s important that viewers still recognize them as flowers. “The in-between path was the perfect path,” she says. “When you close your eyes (a little) you see fireworks, but if you look closely you see flowers.” |