Unravel, Ravel, Revel, Reveal
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
“Whatever I’m thinking about is going to come out, consciously or subconsciously.”
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.