Bait/Switch Vol 4, No 1, Winter 2023: Interview with Sara Ulfsparre about her process and artwork created in response to another artist’s prompt

Bait/Switch is an initiative dedicated to inspiring, connecting, and supporting creative people across disciplines.

The goal of Bait/Switch is to create an enormous body of work that spans time, space, and sensory experience. Their platform allows multiple artists to contribute to the same corpus, an ever-expanding chain of creative call and response.

Bait/Switch is inspired by art party games which are usually played by passing folded up pieces of paper around a table. These activities can be traced back to Victorian evening parlour games such as ‘Consequences’ and ‘Head, Body, and Legs’.

In the 1920’s, the Surrealists reinvented these little titillations as a battery of methods for automatic writing and image making, including the famous Exquisite Corpse. These techniques were embraced as a kind of bridge to the collective unconscious. Automating certain elements of the creative process was seen as a way to tap directly into the subconscious without the rational mind getting in the way.