sara schneckloth

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- in haptic recall -

Push your insides out, turn memory into mark, let what flows through body flow on to page.  Spill your guts and poke them with a stick, see what’s twitching, scoop it up, put it in a jar, screw the lid on.  Put the jar on a shelf with all the other twitchy bits and notice what they have in common.  See what shrivels up to nothing, see what swells and multiplies.  Take notes.  Repeat process.  Learn something?  We can only hope. 

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in haptic recall - 2006 - charcoal, ink, pastel, graphite, tempera and acrylic on paper and aluminum.  132 x 432 inches.

How do we hold memory?  How do memories hold us?  Through drawing, painting, and installation, my work strives to embody moments of remembering and raise questions about the relationship between the body’s physical performance of memory and inscriptive practice.

In this undertaking, I see myself as both scientist and test subject, generating and cataloguing anatomical specimens of emotional engagement.  My drawings originate from deep-seated physical reactions to vivid memories.  Paying attention to my own bodily state – rushes of adrenaline, tightening of muscle, knotting of the gut – as I occupy states of recall, I generate figural forms that function as markers, or containers, of lived experience.  My figures are organic and visceral, imagined biologies alluding to an interior dissected and penetrated.  Taking an analytic step back, I arrange, classify, and connect, seeking systems of thought, anatomies of experience.

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I believe that the act of drawing is a way of residing in multiple states of awareness – of present, past, future – of what one is, has been, and hopes to become – of the physical, the mental, and the formal.  I draw as a way to see more deeply, both inside and out, and to elevate the act of seeing to a process that is fully engaging of both body and mind.  In the gesture of a drawing, there abides the question of how human beings hold memory.  I care about how the body holds its history, and how that recollected history can be performed through the act of making embodied signs.