My work uses ambiguities inherent in various materials to explore the psychologies of transformation and healing. Through installations, photographs, performances, videos and objects I investigate body-centered representations of disorder and the curative. I focus on the body’s cycles of growth, repair, decay, in order to question societal discomfort with these inherently natural processes.
I’m interested in the intersection of the visual/verbal languages of art and science, especially as they relate to physical transformation. Historically glass is a material that catalyzed numerous significant medical and scientific breakthroughs, changing perceptions of the body and the human condition. Glass is non-crystalline, a unique quality in the material sciences: it insulates and protects,and though it is fragile it can endure millenniums. glass blanket, assembled from 1,848 fused glass tiles linked together with copper jump rings becomes an unfamiliar sheath allowing contact with skin. It references the many inherent dichotomies of the material asking glass to serve as an echo skeleton to protect the body from harm.
For the past 17 years I have been part of an interdisciplinary collaboration with my colleague, Tyler Budge. We formed the why be collective, a partnership involved in investigations of our mutual interests in beekeeping and art making. Our various installations have been responses to the intersection of science, art, labor, and nature.
mobile detritus is a lifelong project of collecting cast-off remnants that are found during my daily walks and the everyday navigation of my environment. Because my work is often material and labor intensive, I find the obsessive collecting a "relief" and they become an accumulating alphabet of textures, forms, materials that inform/augment my work. The found objects are collected, and photographed on highly saturated color paper and the resulting photograph adhered to a magnetized sheet. The magnetized sheet is physically sent back out into the world adhered to a metal surface for the viewer to find. Placed in everyday circumstances/sites (alley doorway, sign post in rural landscape, culvert) they celebrate the abject forgotten ephemera of our culture. It is my hope the project will share my collection as a museum collection without walls.
please contact me at: sara(at)sarayoungstudio(dot)com
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