Existential embrace—Sarah Lawson observes crises through collage at New City Arts, exhibit review by Sarah Sargent in C-VILLE Weekly
Artist Statement:
Exhibited at New City Arts’ Welcome Gallery in Charlottesville, Virginia, throughout the month of February 2023, this body of work builds on ideas related to mortality salience—awareness of the inevitability of our own death—as well as the visibility of seas, oceans, lakes, and other waterways as vital reminders of the climate collapse we are currently creating. Like our own bodies, these bodies of water are often sites of trauma and injustice but also opportunities for restoration and liberation.
Consider this a meditation on that world which we are losing, that which we are destroying, even as it offers fleeting moments of transcendence. Also: a developing practice of mindfulness around the ways we live our lives, the ways we trick ourselves into looking away from death and destruction in their myriad forms.
Terror management theory suggests that, when confronted with mortality, individuals and societies will do whatever we can to protect or distract ourselves from the resulting fear of death, in beneficial or detrimental ways. Mortality salience may be wave-like, washing over us throughout our lives, pulling and pushing us like tides as we live, helping us make meaning out of our days or make every effort to avoid doing so. The temptation to dissociate. But what if we can learn to accept death—of the people we love, of the natural world that we share, and of ourselves—as an impetus to create meaning and strengthen connections while we are alive, to focus on interdependence, to leave a legacy of care rather than ego.
By developing a practice around accepting that the end will come, bodily and ecologically, can acts of attention and meaning-making offer new ways of living and dying that are clear-eyed, restorative, and liberatory?
The larger works on display here seek to encourage this meditation on loss, to provide a reason to pause and sit with grief in all its forms: anticipatory grieving for the future, reflective grieving for those and that which has already been lost. Acknowledgement and acceptance of these inevitabilities may provide paths through the paralysis caused by loss and towards the work of mindfulness in how we live our lives and how we care for one another and our world. As a mode of encouraging this reflectiveness, water offers an aesthetic and sensory experience that is both profound and mundane.
The smaller works are selections from the 365/38 project that I undertook in February 2022 (facing a reminder of my own mortality—my birthday) with the goal of creating daily collages as a way of making meaning in a chaotic time, marking the days amidst a pandemic that continues to trouble my perception of linear time, working to stay in my body (to not dissociate), and creating rather than consuming. And maybe being in a body—and being in the world—and accepting the ends that are inherent in both bodies and worlds, maybe that is a first step in managing terror and making meaning. A first step, to be followed by a second, and a third, and so on.
As 365/38 concluded, this exhibit has been a chance to reflect on the work that I created (and that which went unmade, an exercise in self-forgiveness), seeing anew how the practice connected me to others, the reminders of days when it was a struggle and those when it was an exaltation to take scissors to paper, finding joy in the smallest scrap of pattern or hint of color amidst ample reminders of our own bodily fragility and the precarity of our climate and planet. This process was emboldened through the opportunity to work as a New City Arts artist-in-residence, where I was able to continue to explore what it means to practice creativity and care, in community or in solitude, but always in gratitude.
