w o r d s
Artist Statement
How
do we hold memory? How do memories hold us? I pose these questions
as the starting point for my work, as I strive to embody moments of
remembering, and consider the relationship between the body’s physical performance
of memory and inscriptive practice.
My
work deals primarily with imagined microbiological systems rendered on a macro-
scale. I envision and create cells,
organs, fluids, and tissues, and seek to assemble the elements into new systems
of organic relationship and connection.
I work in a variety of mediums, primarily in drawing and painting, and
look for ways to take drawing beyond its traditional definition of “mark on
paper.” I integrate traditional
techniques with non-traditional mediums and approaches to create large
installation pieces.
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 remembered events.
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. As part of thinking about
the visual culture of science, my work also concerns issues of scale. I seek to shift the “micro-” to “macro-,”
and offer up large-scale visions of microbiological events and spaces as a way
to invite the casual viewer into an encompassing visual field. Cells and organs mirror the proportions of
the body, a reflection on the components of the self.
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.
Excerpt from “Speculating
on a Nervous Line” published in Manifest’s International
Drawing Annual 2007
Body, mind. Science, magic. Visible, invisible. Outside, inside. Logic, superstition. Looking for the bridges and betweens. Is it this or is it that? Is it both and therefore more? The Grand Unified Theory in physics looks to
strings for answers; perhaps, too, one may look to the line for insight into
the bridging of absolutes; to see the drawn line as both an object and an
action, a concrete thing that acts as intercessor and point of intersection, as
sacrum and site of unconscious projection.
What happens when one draws a line?
Or many lines, in relationship to each other? What power is held by the marked line to
communicate experience, both internal and external? What does it mean when one declares a drawn
line “true” and what are the conditions of this truth – the truth of the
moment, of the individual, of the image, of the context in which it is made?
The
marked line issues from the body of its maker.
It is a record of a body’s processes and movements, of a mind’s idea, a
record of intention and instinct. The
line is a technology, at once a knowing and a making. It renders, describes, delineates,
measures, marks. A drawn line enables
sensations, emotions, and ideas to become manifest, through touch and
sight. It is the fixing of a visceral
act in a visual image. Does the marked
line then “make visible the data structures that are our bodies?” Does the mark serve as a point of
transmutation between inward object (the stimulated nerve) and the perceived object
(the landscape, the figure, the still life), yielding an image in which we can
see both the artist and ourselves?
http://www.manifestgallery.com/nda/index.html
Excerpt from “Marking Time, Figuring Space: Gesture and the
Embodied Moment” published in the journal
of visual culture, December 2008
To
draw the memory of the memory – to try to go as far as I can to a sincere space
of awareness, striving for what drawing feels like at its peak of freedom, and
acting out of what I remember to be an arc of a true connection; it is to break
into a new state, one that is a fleeting release from perceived time and
expectation. This is a dance with
material and surface, engaging of body and mind, a practice that feels
generative, improvised and self-sustaining.
When it works, the passions are layered and palpable, no longer tethered
to a discrete moment of recalled crisis but emerging out of the process of
memory-making itself. I can feel my skin
flush, I surge with a specific urgency. Something new is generated from the body’s
habit, a gesture to, and informed by, inner life. The question then turns outward – how can a
gesture, once inscribed, be tangibly vitalized beyond the moment of its
making? What new meanings are produced
when the bodies of spectators participate in re-figuring the gestural moment?
I
believe an invitation to a viewer to physically touch and alter a drawing’s
surface constitutes one avenue for an ongoing opening of the work. Points of connection emerge through a network
of linked potentials - present to past : emotional
pulse to kinesthetic movement : body to material : artwork to viewer : artist
to audience : wall to space : gallery to community. The desire for multidirectional flow between
these sites inspires me and feeds the need for a more consciously relational
aesthetic. I now integrate participatory
elements into my drawings, sculptural elements that can be manipulated by a
viewer, invitations to touch, to make choices, to redirect vision. My hope is to bring the organ of skin more
fully into play, to engage a beholder through more than vision, and mobilize an
embodying spectatorship. A central concern in this work is how to keep
the drawing in a state of flux and possibility, and activate a scene in which
spectators’ sensations are active across multiple fields of perception.
Featured Artist -
http://artsinstitute.sc.edu/featuredartist/schneckloth.shtml
Interview with Leslie
Hinton – Memory and Process
http://arthfilm555.blogspot.com/2007/12/sara-schneckloth-questionnaire.html
“Art and Expression –
Balancing Technique and Exploration,” International
Child and Youth Care Network,
http://www.cyc-net.org/today2000/today000910.html
“Seeing Trans for the Trees: Rhizomatic
Curatorial Frameworks and the Visualizing TRANS Exhibition,” by Amy Noell. Published in
In Visible Culture 2008
http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_11/noell/noell.html
Reviews
columbiacitypaper.com/ArtsTheatre-Literature/Arts-Coverage/Reactive-Drawings.html
www.carolinaarts.com/1008usccolumbia1.html
www.ledger-enquirer.com/392/story/353221.html
www.dailycardinal.com/article/1098
www.artthrob.co.za/01mar/listings-cape.html
www.artistswanted.org/sara_schneckloth.html
www.thestate.com/weekend/story/550092.html
www.madisonmagazine.com/article.php?section_id=918&xstate=view_story&story_id=233874