Sharna Osborne crossed the world on instinct. She left rural New Zealand trusting only a sense that something waited elsewhere and landed in east London a decade ago, into the only place that ever felt like arriving.
Her pictures announce themselves before her name does. For years the signature was a surface, the VHS haze, the pastel grounds, an adult image lodged inside an archaic blue-and-pink coding it won't sit still within, and it is tempting to file the work under nostalgia and leave it there. But Osborne is now the one filing it away: the patina, she says, is something she has finished exploring and she is turning back to the content itself, reaching for other cameras.
What follows is an artist mid-shed, surer of what she is leaving than of what waits on the other side, and more articulate about her fears than about anything she has already made. The fear is never the not-knowing, which she trusts and always has; it is doing the not-knowing alongside people who aren't communicative, or collaborative, or kind. And it is stuckness. A strange thing to dread in someone who has spent a decade making pictures that hold people still.
But the thing she is really after sits underneath all of it, and she has been circling it for years: the sense that her pictures say more about her than about the people in them. Here she says it plainly. She does not photograph the people she is drawn to in order to get close to them; she photographs them because she wants to be them, because they say something with their bodies she feels she cannot.
