Today I’m in conversation with the extraordinary Sarah Boris, an artist who treats symbols like building blocks and colour like architecture.
Her practice moves between sculpture, drawing, printmaking, painting and bookmaking, yet everything she makes feels connected by a rigorous, playful logic. You might know her Fragile UK Flag — a reimagined Union Jack made from delicate tape and paper, exhibited at the Design Museum in London and now held in major public collections including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
A national emblem made vulnerable. A bold gesture made breakable.
But this conversation is less about icons and more about expansion.
We dive into her modular works — a vast body of over one hundred drawings that evolved into nesting sculptures, furniture modules and her largest sculpture to date. We talk about scale not as ego, but as curiosity. And then there is Time for Peace, a conceptual clock that quietly marks the peace symbol four times a day. No grand spectacle. Just a subtle interruption in the rhythm of time.
This episode is about systems and softness. About building something precise without losing play. About committing to a visual language so fully that it begins to grow its own architecture.
If you’ve ever wondered how a small, obsessive idea becomes a life’s work, this conversation will show you how.
Now let me introduce you to Sarah Boris.
What We Learned from Sarah Boris
What stays with me after speaking with Sarah is her devotion to structure without becoming trapped by it.
Her modular works are not just formal experiments. They are philosophies. They suggest that nothing is fixed. That elements can shift, nest, expand, contract. That a drawing can become a sculpture. A book can become a building. A symbol can be softened and recharged at the same time.
There is also a tenderness in the way she approaches cultural language. The flag becomes fragile. The clock becomes a quiet call for peace. Words shared across languages become bridges rather than borders. She treats symbols carefully, but never passively. They are always open to reinterpretation.
And there is something quietly generative in her relationship to place. Residencies are not interruptions in her practice — they are catalysts. Different light, different constraints, different rhythms of life all become active forces in the work itself.
Perhaps the deeper invitation here is to think less in terms of fixed outcomes, and more in systems that can grow.
Let your smaller works teach you how to build bigger ones. Let your drawings become blueprints. Let your obsessions scale through repetition and variation, rather than sudden leaps.
If you’ve been holding onto an idea that feels too playful, too structural, or too ambitious, this conversation offers a simple permission: test it, stack it, and see what it becomes.
