Sarah Mac
Statement
“She thought for the first time in her life that it was nothing that was hers, that belonged to her, but just a pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn't really hers either.”
―Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
When you think of a book, you think of a story that is enclosed between a front cover and a back cover. The only place where that story exists. For me, I choose the forms of printmaking and bookmaking the only place where stories, documents, and emotions can exist. My work is autobiographical in nature and confronts the spectrum of human emotion, whether it is my own emotion or someone close to me. I document my everyday life and significant events through collage with journal writings and letters, photographs, and voice memos in order to savor the raw emotion that was felt in that moment. Once a project is made and I am no longer experiencing that situation, the evidence is deleted and I begin a new cycle of documentation.
Process is one of the most important components of making work for me. To look through all the “evidence” that I had collected, and having to relive through these experiences, is painful, but it is also beautiful. While making a piece of art, I look at it as a time of reflection. However long a project may take me to create, it is a time where I reflect on how far my loved ones, or I, have come.
My work through paper and print tells a narrative of the self and identity through the landscape of my own body. Something that I have dreaded to acknowledge until now. In my most recent series, Untitled (Bodies), I work from photocopied scans of my body where I later take the flattened images and rebuild those forms to make them three-dimensional again. Using 3-D printouts of my body, I create molds, filling them or layering them with finely beat cotton paper pulp. By acknowledging the dysmorphia that I have dealt with since I was a young girl, I am just now realizing the importance of these flesh vessels that we all occupy. We live in these bodies for a lifetime, yet for the twenty-two years that I have lived in mine, it never felt like mine.
Printmaking (BFA) Students