artist statement & bio:

Raffia, coir, reclaimed marine rope, seagrass hangs off the walls, cascading into fountains of chaos. Books are strewn about the tables and chairs. A variety of subjects grab my attention. Boat building in Ireland, criticism by Dave Hickey, Third Wave Feminism rhetoric and essays by John D'Agata all influence my thoughts, my work, my movements. Each evening I ask myself – do I have the courage to grab the meat hook?

I wander about the studio stitching, cinching, unraveling and revealing different layers of fiber. Weave, unweave, stitch, suture and skin over with wax, tar, cement, whatever raw materials I can find and manage with my hands. The chapters of my life unfold in work. Abstraction, mystery, concern, aggression and sexuality I am unable to not speak of – but is in the forefront of my mind. My hands do not resist the taboo but thoroughly embrace it, relish in it. It's as if when my hands are working the truth of my thoughts sneak around my hesitancies and asks the materials, begs them to be bold, to hold court, to challenge and suggest. The work is braver than I am.

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Sarah Hewitt is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico with a constant passion to be nearer the ocean. Creating imagery and objects that question our perceptions is full-time job. Equally invested in providing clients around the country with customized design services, Sarah stretches her time being the principal of Straijtacket Design, LLC. Her work is exhibited around the country, has garnered many awards, grants, residencies, and is frequently featured in international and local art magazines.

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presentations/representations…the story…choices full of grace and mistakes
the good, the bad and damn ugly ..

Many of us are raised with our families' or societies' ideals for us instead of our own. Our parents/teachers/spouses become mirrors for us to see our reflection in – but sometimes that reflection is closer to a fun-house mirror than reality.

Do our appearances really tell the truth about ourselves? Do our work, life and families really illustrate who we as individuals are? Is there another story that we are living and not our own?

I want to write my own story – my own good, bad and damn ugly story. Fear nearly cripples me when I think of who I might really be and not who I've imagined or acted for so many years. But isn't the ultimate freedom when you acknowledge your true self and flaunt it?

In my work there is no hesitation or need for me to mask my thoughts, memories or desires. I'm honest at that point with the viewer and myself. This is my platform to present myself to myself, and others, working.
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How we hold our loved one's bodies as they come into and leave our lives is the focus of my explorations in Cradleboards to Coffins.

Nestings, wrappings and bindings encase the spirit and body in birth and death. Mothers swaddle their newborns to provide a womb outside the womb; use casings for transportation of their young, and to create a structured environment in which the parents may choose the their child's first views of society. In death we send our loved ones away in coffins and caskets. The funerary bindings protect the living from disease, decay and the insurmountable fear of our own death.

Our customs for the newly born and recently departed are vibrantly similar though grossly separated. Through the methods of textile techniques I am exploring the forms of packaging society uses to contain our bodies and our spirits throughout our lives.

Raffia, seagrass, tar and waxes compose these new works. Aromatic, and textural I aspire to transport the viewer into a quiet, meditative space. The forms are created using random weave basket techniques, intuitively winding individual strands of fiber throughout a mass of loose fiber to create a solid form. Then using random stitching I contort the vessel's shape sewing the sides together and begin to create the feel of a human form pushing on the sides of the wrappings. As the casings develop I feel the conversation I hold with each one end and my respect for their existence blossoms. 

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Sarah Hewitt lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she creates sculptures using textile techniques and patinated with waxes, tars and cement. Sarah has achieved notoriety in many mediums having taught many of them. Her work is exhibited around the country, as well as published in Surface Design Journal, Shuttle, Spindle and Dyepot, Santa Fe Trend and FiberArts. Recently she was honored by being named one of the top 150 artists in New Mexico by Diane Karp of the Santa Fe Art Institute and the Santa Fean.

 
critical reviews:

NAUGHTY BY NATURE
Santa Fe Reporter, July 7, 2010
by Marin Sardy

I once knew a guy who, when he was on LSD, couldn't handle being in nature. All that exaggeratedly twining, entangling growth was just too creepy for him, so he only took the drug in visually sanitized city spots, surrounded by concrete and steel. Although I found him absurd, as a biology student I had seen enough of the unsettling and uncontrollable messiness of life that I got his point. Now I'm reminded of it when I look at the sculptures of local fiber artist Sarah Hewitt.

Hewitt's heavily textured abstract forms, on display in the two-artist show Lost & Found at Victoria Price Art & Design, feel viscerally alive in ways we usually prefer to forget. Composed of wax and grass-like raffia—and vaguely resembling body parts, plant parts or unicellular blobs—the sculptures suggest breaches of their own limits. At once foreign and familiar, they're as beguiling as they are disturbing—because they are disturbing. Hewitt's waxy coatings appear membranous, her structural folds look vaginal, grassy openings suggest nests and elongated shapes recall standing figures. There's also a hint of violence in the deep red dyes and misshapen bends.

These forms are somehow human, yet invertebrate enough to make humans recoil—a reminder of how strongly we have historically tried to define ourselves as separate from animals. Even the most ardent tree huggers can rarely resist Disney-vision: the urge to tidy up nature, either aesthetically or structurally, so it makes more sense. But as Hewitt's work announces, that's just not the nature of nature.

Tying together sex, reproduction and the female body—literally—a sculpture titled "Umbilicus" has a heavily folded, basket-like construction hanging like a bou lder from the ceiling in a cage of red rope. The message, perhaps: Without connection to the mother, we would be in a free fall. Nearby, the droopy, blood-red floor sculpture of waxed canvas and grass titled "Mistress" is nearly painful to observe. Suggesting both boldness and injury, the spade-shaped form's gruesomely slumping lobes reach up to a prickly phallic appendage that tops it like a cap, enfolding emotional import into the body of fabric in ways I've never seen. Hewitt is like Louise Bourgeois with organic materials.

Beside these absorbing amalgams, Nancy Hidding Pollock's cairn-shaped assemblages come off as amateur and facile. At first, I took her stacked sheet-metal ovals to be just glorified interior decoration. To be that, however, they would have to be decorative. Instead, with neither cohesion nor punch and lacking the subtle visual sensibility that separates good design from bad, the result is awkward and not engaging.

It's much more rewarding to compare Hewitt to another female artist with sculpture showing in Santa Fe: Judy Chicago. The mother of feminist art, Chicago is world-famous, but her strength has always been her weirdly cerebral social gutsiness more than her artistic acumen. In The Toby Heads, a series of cast-glass busts and porcelain goblets made from a single model, Chicago attempts to usurp and reconfigure "masculine" media like auto-body painting. But her work has a way of not quite aligning with her vision of how it challenges prevailing attitudes. It comes off instead as either too straightforward or out of sync.

The pieces work best when Toby's elderly androgyny and mournfully downcast gaze, exaggerated by her bald head and the work's high-gloss finish, offer a touching look at human frailty. More often, the brightly colored translucent glass renders Toby clownish, like a caricature of an aging transvestite. Cups lining the walls portray her in even more extreme-seeming parody, with her painted two-sided faces gaping absurdly. Rather than building to something grander, the work's incongruities just seem incongruent. So as hard as Chicago tries to undermine gender-based prejudices in the art world, it's Hewitt who actually succeeds.

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Jon Carver
THE Magazine, July 2007, Page 75

Sarah Hewitt is all about the making. She explores expressive qualities of high-art basketry within the broad context of contemporary aesthetics. This ain't the underwater basket-making activity you did at day camp. This is high craft married to an uncanny ability to evoke emotion through abstraction, recalling both Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. More than a touch of the primitivist/universal haunts her project. Despite being rigorously abstract her pieces always seem mysteriously endowed with the kind of arresting emotive presence traditionally found in figurative form.
 
curriculum vitae:

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS/RESIDENCIES:

2012
  • Fiber Philadelphia 2012, Crane Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
  • Inaugural 40 Under 40, Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, Louisiana
2011
  • Quimby Colony, Artist Residency, Portland, Maine
  • Teaching Assistant, Penland School of Crafts, Penland, North Carolina
  • Teaching Assistant, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle. Maine
  • SOFA West Installation on Museum Hill of the LOVE ARMOR Project, Santa Fe, NM
  • Vermont Studio Center, Artist Residency, Johnson, Vermont

2010

  • New Fibers 2010, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI
  • Unraveling Traditions: Contemporary Artists Working in Fiber, 516 ARTS, Albuquerque, NM
  • Lost & Found, Victoria Price Art & Design, Santa Fe, NM
  • Subversive Stitching: Feminist Artists with a Needle, Through the Flower, Belen, NM

2009

  • Earth's Palette, Wilder Nightingale Fine Art, Taos, NM
  • LOVE ARMOR PROJECT, Brenda Taylor Gallery, New York, NY
  • National Fiber Directions Exhibition 2009, Wichita, KS
  • LOVE ARMOR PROJECT, Crane Arts, Ice Box Project Space, Philadelphia, PA

2008

  • Conventions & Attitudes: Responding to the 2008 U.S. Elections, Habeas Lounge, CUNY Graduate Center Art Gallery, NYC, NY
  • Conventions & Attitudes: Responding to the 2008 U.S. Elections, Remy's On Temple, Los Angeles, CA
  • Engendered Spaces, SCA Contemporary, Albuquerque, NM
  • LOVE ARMOR PROJECT, Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, NM
  • Talking Heads, Seven - O - Seven Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
  • The Cradle Project, Albuquerque, NM
  • Salon MarGraff, Tesuque, NM

2007   

  • The Cradle Project Preview Exhibition, Zane Bennett Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
  • LOOSELY JOINED: New Mexico Artists from the Creative Capital Program, 516 Arts, Albuquerque, NM
  • The Cradle Project Preview Exhibition, Linda Durham Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, NM
  • The Cradle Project Preview Exhibition, AIA, Albuquerque, NM
  • Inaugural Exhibition, Underground Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
  • Faculty and Technical Assistants Exhibition, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts,  Deer Isle, ME
  • Summer Art Show, Tesuque Village Market, Tesuque, NM
  • Bang!, Farrell Fischoff Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
  • WOMADelaide 2007, Adelaide, Australia

2006    

  • Anniversary Exhibition, Salon Mar Graff, Tesuque, NM
  • Hold It!, Shy Rabbit Contemporary Arts, Pagosa Springs, CO
  • Faculty and Technical Assistants Exhibition, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts,  Deer Isle, ME
  • Small Expressions, HGA's Convergence, Grand Rapids, MI
  • Creative Grand Crossings, HGA's Convergence, Grand Rapids, MI
  • Salon Mar Graff, Tesuque, NM
  • Ongoing Exhibition, Métier Gallery, Dixon, NM

2005    

  • Weaving and Fiber Arts of the Southwest, The Art Center at Fuller's Lodge, Los Alamos, NM
  • Challenge New Mexico, Santa Fe, NM
  • Ongoing Exhibition, Métier Gallery, Dixon, NM

2003    

  • Wearable Expressions, Palos Verdes Art Center, Palos Verdes, CA

2002    

  • Celebration of Craftswomen, San Francisco, CA
  • International Colour Congress, Iowa City, IA
  • Fiber Celebration 2002, Northern Colorado Weavers Guild, Fort Collins, CO
  • 2-3-4-Dimensions IV, Period Gallery, Omaha, NE
  • Faces of Woman, Honorable Mention, Las Vegas Arts Council, Las Vegas, NM

2001    

  • Nature Observed, Art Studio Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
  • New Mexico Women Artists, Harwood Museum, Taos, NM


HONORS:

2011

  • Quimby Colony, Artist Residency, Portland, Maine
  • Teaching Assistant Scholarship, Penland School of Crafts, Penland, North Carolina
  • Teaching Assistant Scholarship, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle. Maine
  • Vermont Studio Center, Artist Residency, Johnson, Vermont

2010

  • Honorable Mention Award,Subversive Stitching: Feminist Artists with a Needle, Through the Flower, Jurors Judy Chicago and Laura Addison

2008

  • Named one of the Top 150 Artist of New Mexico by Diane Karp and theSanta Fean Magazine
  • Anderson Ranch Scholarship, Snowmass Viallage, CO
  • Artist Residency at Spiro Arts, Park City, UT

2007

  • Technical Assistant Scholarship, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts
  • WOMADelaide Tjanpi Desert Weavers Workshop Scholarship

2006

  • Creative Capital, Professional Development Grant
  • Technical Assistant Scholarship, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts

2002

  • Honorable Mention Award, Faces of Woman, Las Vegas Arts Council


PUBLICATIONS & VIDEOGRAPHY:

  • "Fiber Works Exhibitions". Shuttle, Spindle & Dyepot. Volume XLI No.3, Issue 163, Summer 2010
  • Sauthoff. Patricia. "Cool Threads". Weekly Alibi. July 15 - 21, 2010. V. 19 No.28
  • Sardy. Marin. "Naughty by Nature". Santa Fe Reporter. July 7, 2010. Page 28
  • Roberts. Kathleen. "Love Armor Project". Fiber Arts Magazine. April/May 2009. Pages 30-31
  • Price. Meghan. "Creative Thinking in Basketry with Hisako Sekijima". Cahier Metiers d'Art::Craft Journal. Winter 2009. Pages 96-102
  • Hill. Lori. "Ice Box Project Space". Philadelphia City Paper. February 3, 2009
  • Graphic Action. The Graphic Conscience. January 20, 2009
  • Carver, Jon. "The Love Armor Project". THE Magazine. November 2008. Page 45
  • Fisher. Zane. "Local, If Not Lucid". Santa Fe Reporter. September 24, 2008
  • Majerowicz. Amy. "Tough Love: The Love Armor Project". New Mexico Free Press. September 17, 2008
  • Russon. Kim. "Too Cozy". Journal Santa Fe. September 19, 2008
  • Roberts. Kathleen. "Bringing the War Home". Albuquerque Journal. September 5, 2008
  • Documentart Film for the LOVE ARMOR Project
  • The Cradle Project. Firelight Foundation. Pages 28-29
  • "Top Talent". Santa Fean Magazine. June/July 2008. Pages 56-67
  • Hewitt. Sarah. Fiber Arts Magazine. Summer 2008. Pages 22-23
  • "Gallery Wall: Spiro Arts". Park City Flipside. May 22-June 4, 2008. Page 18
  • Park City Television. Morning Show. May 21, 2008
  • Rossiter. Shaun. "A Good Idea is Not Enough". 15 Bytes. May 2008. Page 4
  • Kotler. Steve. "Land Rover, Land Rover, Toss That Afghan Over". Santa Fe Trend. Spring/Summer 2008. Page 42
  • Mayfield. Dan. "Gallery A Hot Spot for Art Programs". The Sunday Journal. November 4, 2007
  • Pasatiempo. Santa Fe New Mexican. November 2007
  • "Samplings". Fiber Arts Magazine. November/December 2007. Page 30
  • Caver. Jon. "Bang!". THE Magazine. July 2007. Page 75
  • "Creative Grand Crossings - Multimedia Interlacements Exhibit". Shuttle, Spindle & Dyepot. Spring 2007. Page 60
  • Coffee. Denise. "Hold It!". Pagosa Daily Post. November 29, 2006
  • "Small Expressions". Shuttle, Spindle & Dyepot. Fall 2006
  • Fisher. Zane. Trend Magazine. Fall 2006/Winter 2007. Page 34
  • Surface Design Journal. Members Gallery. 2006. Page 57

EDUCATION

2011

  • Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Charissa Brock

2008

  • Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Barbara Cooper
  • Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Hisako Sekijima

2007

  • Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, John Garrett

2006

  • Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Sandy Elverd

2005 

  • Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Tracy Krumm

2003

  • Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Katharine Cobey

1995

  • Southern Methodist University, BFA, Photography and Painting

1994

  • Rhode Island School of Design, Photography

1992-1994

  • St. John's College, Philosophy

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