What does it mean to capture someone in a photograph? The language of photography suggests a certain authority over its subject: to frame, to focus, to fix an image. In Sandra Brewster’s work, the photograph is anything but fixed. Figures move beyond the camera’s capacity to record them clearly, while images are transferred between surfaces, archiving impressions, abrasions, and other marks that complicate their original appearance. What might ordinarily be considered a technical imperfection becomes an opportunity to see things differently.

Born in Toronto to Guyanese parents, Brewster has long been interested in how movement shapes our sense of identity, particularly for those whose experiences of home extend across generations and geographies. Employing various mediums, she approaches image-making as a process of continual discovery. Her subjects are often people she knows, while the photographs and objects she works with carry intimate associations with family, community, and the Caribbean diaspora. Yet, her work is equally concerned with what cannot be immediately understood. In her ongoing Blur series, initiated in 2016, the indistinctness of the figures challenges the expectation that a portrait should offer a definitive account of its subject.

In the lead-up to Paris Photo, featuring a selection of photographic works by the artist, Southern Guild spoke to Brewster about the relationship between memory and material, the unexpected discoveries that emerge through process, and the evolving possibilities of Blur.

Your practice spans photography, drawing, painting, video, and installation, but ideas of movement, memory, identity, and place recur throughout. What questions have remained most constant for you, and how does working across these different mediums shape the way you explore them?

I see myself primarily as a mark-maker, regardless of the medium I’m working in. In my current work, the process is one of revealing and managing marks that may or may not appear. These are the spaces and gaps that invite interpretation, feeling, and a deeper connection with movement and time.

I’m always searching for an understanding of why I’m curious about the things I’m curious about, and at times, the work responds through its surfaces as I reveal them.

You were born and raised in Toronto to Guyanese parents and have spoken about carrying ties to places we may not have lived ourselves through family, memory, and culture. How have notions of home and displacement, resettlement and belonging evolved through your work?

Despite being born in Toronto and having visited Guyana only a few times, I feel a connection to that place. My work engages with this through representations of familiar imagery that evoke a specific time period or allow us to feel a connection to something My 2018 series Token | Contemporary Ongoing explored this. I asked people to contribute personal objects that resonated with a sense of “back home” somewhere in the Caribbean. I then photographed these objects and created gel transfers from the images as well. The photographs were large-scale and crisp, a quality guaranteed by the process, and both presentations elevated the objects, foregrounding their importance.

There is a specialness to these objects, regardless of how tattered Granny’s handkerchief is or how impossible it is to get the food stains out of the Dutch pot. The pointer broom hangs on the wall in perfect shape, never used, despite being a tool for cleaning. The project brought together many of these personal treasures and their owners’ reflections, expressing a deep need to keep them around. In a way, they are always carrying home with them.

This relationship between the tangible and the remembered extends throughout Brewster’s photographic practice. In her work, an image is rarely confined to the instant it records. It carries associations with other places, times, and experiences that may not belong solely to the person looking at it. In ‘Make Trouble’ (2024), most recently exhibited by Southern Guild at The Armory Show in 2026, she revisits a photograph from her own childhood depicting children playing musical chairs at a backyard birthday party. What begins as a personal recollection opens onto broader questions about childhood, collective responsibility and the future.

Found images and family photographs are recurring source material in your practice. What draws you to these images, and how do you understand their relationship to memory, history and the archive?

I’m usually insinuating that there is an extension to the story beyond what we see within the frame of the photographs I find and take. It may be a particular location in which a figure is positioned, an ironic juxtaposition of figures and environments, or a scene that suggests a significant memory reflecting a general state of being. Not everything is absolutely clear.

The work may resonate with the idea of an “archive,” as it has a tangible quality that speaks to a past of importance, something we relate to in some way. I don’t see the archive as only a reflection of the past; it is a space where all time is embedded. Our relationship with that time is present, too. It is truly a sense of being, as the work not only reflects history but also a sense of the connection we always carry with us.

When I look at the image of children playing musical chairs in a backyard, a photograph I referenced in Make Trouble, it becomes more than simply a playful scene. I think of children in general, the importance of protecting them, the times we are currently living in, and how essential it is to care for the future. A visual scene of children immediately has me hearing the sounds of their presence. I titled the piece Make Trouble almost as a call to these young folks to maintain some kind of resistance and remain aware of their times.

Movement takes many forms in your work, from the gestures of the figures you depict to the marks that emerge through your process. How has your understanding of movement evolved through the act of making?

I’m beginning to become more aware of the slowest “movement” I encounter as I work close to the work itself, particularly as it reveals itself to me through the making. It’s found in the details. There is always a new mark that appears. It’s as though I’m finding meaning through the abstract. The meaning I intend when I begin a project, and expect to experience when a piece is completed, is actually something I experience throughout the process, in the details I’m exposed to up close. From this vantage point, the surfaces remind me of aerial views of landscapes, collapsing the relationship between figure and environment.

When I express gesture through figures, as I do in Blur, I’m suggesting a relationship with identity that is multidimensional, unfixed and complex, a mash-up of time and place, possibly inspired again by my upbringing and experiences of travel. Through the surfaces, I’m insinuating that there is something left behind, while a big part of us moves with us.

This openness to discovery is central to Brewster’s distinctive gel transfer process. Paper tears, sections of the image disappear, new marks emerge – and while she has become increasingly adept at directing these effects, her interest lies as much in responding to what happens as in controlling it.

“I welcome the gaps and traces that manifest, sometimes adding to and manipulating them,” she explains. “This contributes to my enjoyment of making the work, playing with the medium to influence how we view it.”

You’ve spoken about becoming less concerned with keeping the transferred image intact and approaching some of these works almost as you would a painting. How does this freedom influence the decisions you make when working with a photograph?

When I decide to use a photograph in my work, it’s not only because of what is being depicted, but even more so because of how it is being depicted. I begin to think about how the composition will influence my decisions around possible initial washes of colour and where to leave out sections of the image during production, allowing for a more organic relationship between image and medium. I am playing.

When Brewster first began photographing friends and family for ‘Blur’ in 2016, she asked them to move in front of the camera, allowing the slow shutter speed to register their gestures rather than a clearly defined likeness.

There is a deliberate tension here. Portraiture has historically been bound up with questions of recognition, identification and the power of the gaze. Curator and writer Julie Crooks draws on Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity to consider how Brewster’s blurred portraits resist the expectation that an image should make its subject fully knowable. The figures are present without being entirely available to scrutiny, challenging the viewer’s assumed right to identify and categorise.

Over the past decade, Blur has continued to evolve, moving between intimate photographic works and monumental wall transfers. Brewster has become increasingly interested in the spirit and energy of her subjects, seeking a greater sense of freedom in their gestures. “I want there to be a subtle audacity within these figures,” she says, “something I think is necessary today.” At monumental scale, the relationship between subject and viewer shifts again. “They take up space, asserting their presence and becoming monumental. They hold the viewer’s gaze,” Brewster explains. The figures may evade identification, but they are impossible to overlook. Enlarged beyond life-size, their gestures and the material traces of their making become part of an immersive encounter

A decade into Blur, what does the series represent for you today, and where do you see it going next?

The Blur series is special to me because it truly represents, visually, what I personally identify with: a sense of identity that collapses place and time, a contemporary sense of being shaped by an upbringing among people who physically moved from one place to another. Through its gestures, I’ve expressed a movement that gives the figure agency, denying the viewer complete entry and presenting an unfixable presence, one that cannot be contained. I feel like the Blur series expresses strength and dignity while, through its materiality, suggesting a significant existence. I’m excited to explore this further and to engage with new materials on which these works, at various scales, can live.

Southern Guild will present Blur 41 and Blur 23 from Brewster’s ongoing Blur series at Paris Photo, on view from 12–15 November 2026 at Booth B54 in Grand Palais, Paris.