Sarah Perry
Sarah Perry resembles a hunter-gatherer as she searches for weeks and months to find abandoned artifacts in remote locations in order to create her sculptures. She conjures poetic narratives from the bones found in owl “cough balls” or tire scraps on the sides of freeways. Her orientation as an artist is through the lens of the philosopher, always examining the desire to understand our part in the larger realm of nature and the universe. She brings together our understanding of the world above and below.
Here, Sarah Perry speaks about her work:
“Most of my sculptures begin from a fully formed idea. I'll be watering the yard, driving or otherwise immersed in the mundane when, like a clap, there it is. Beast of Burden is a nine foot tall old-style rocket made from cattle leg and jaw bones. I drove many hundreds of miles to collect all of the bones, in addition encountering lots of odd and wonderful adventures along the way. I tried to communicate through this piece, the merger of the weight of our brutish past with our striving to explore and understand our present. Pull of the Moon is another piece born of bones, only minute ones. Owls ingest small creatures, dissolve the protein and regurgitate a sterile ball of fur and bones. When examined closely, they look just like ours- tiny ribs, ball and socket hip joints and miniscule molars. Bags of these treasures were collected in the mountains of Nevada. All of those lives and our shared evolution became a spiral staircase, DNA-like in it's ascent upward. Similarly, many days were spent on freeways gathering blown out truck tires to create a series of life sized gorillas. Although I frequently weld, saw, drill, carve, glue, paint and otherwise manipulate these disparate objects, it remains important that my hand not show in the process. I want the works to look as if they had been born that way, as if you happened to stumble upon them in some long forgotten alchemist's attic.
Sculpture, for me, is how I communicate my subtlest emotions and deepest beliefs succinctly. They can be frightening as an uncensored dream, humorous, or touch on the unknown or unknowable. I am by nature a 'hunter/gatherer', often seeking the awe in things. It's in my very marrow to look.”
