This is how I feel. A conversation with Sarah Fisher
Así es como me siento. Una conversación con Sarah Fisher
Wendolyn Lozano Tovar
Sarah Fisher is a visual artist who explores portraiture through the lens of painting, collage, printmaking, installation and sculpture, with the same passion that she incorporates language for her conceptual art. Solo exhibitions include: It’s OK To Feel This, Lanecia Rouse Tinsley Gallery, Houston, TX (2024), When I Walk I See Things, landSPACE: a kunsthalle, Austin, TX (2023), You Won’t See It Coming, Museum of East Texas, Lufkin, TX (2022); Decisions, Michelson Museum of Art, Marshall, TX (2022); It’s No Small Thing, Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, Lubbock, TX (2021); The Second Yes, Front Gallery, Houston, TX (2019); and Seen, Art Palace Gallery, Houston, TX (2017).
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WL. Your work is powerfully related to the search for the self. Where does your creative impulse come from to represent portraits in different formats, media and dimensions, from wood or canvas to the humble cardboard for everyday use?
SF. I record the human need to be authentically seen. Working in a variety of media, I create two- and three-dimensional portraits of myself and people I know, love and encounter. My subjects share a strong sense of self and a willingness to be known.
WL. As an artist, does mindfulness play a role when it comes to represent reality as well as illusion? How did your project It’s ok to feel this came about?
SF. Mindfulness has helped me to more fully recognize and value the present moment. I have learned and worked hard to build up the resilience to sit with challenging feelings and emotions and to say to myself, “It’s OK to feel this,” a phrase I have learned from the great meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein. I have really had to practice not pushing away uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, emotions. I have learned to say “this is fear” instead of “I am afraid.” I have learned the importance of observing, not identifying, with the thoughts in my mind. This approach to processing life informs my art making. Sometimes I create extremely raw, realistic works. Other times, I follow my imagination wherever it leads me. I let the creativity flow.
WL. Your work conveys bold concepts that are more evident in your installations. Do you believe art is a vehicle to understand human nature?
SF. Working in a larger scale, in a variety of methods and materials, is freeing and offers so many possibilities for communicating what I am trying to understand and what I have learned about being human. The simple act of engaging in the creative process, the decision to say to myself, “This is how I feel — how can I communicate this in a relevant but unexpected way” is my vehicle of choice and has been since I was very young.
WL. How does poetry fuel your creative process? When you were a little girl you wrote about a “firm foundation to see clearly/ that our lives are worth living”. Why is language so important for you as a visual artist?
Since I was a young girl, writing — and writing poetry in particular — has served a vital means for expressing feelings impossible to craft into complete sentences. As I’ve gotten older, I have continued to turn to poetry to express complex, intense points of view.
Writing has always come easily to me. It’s a gift for which I am extremely grateful. I have always been a protest artist, since my twenties when I worked as a creative professional in the advertising business. Words have weight. Words are sacred to me. I use them with great intention in my life and in my work — to demonstrate my passions, my loves, my fears, and my joys. I use them to create awareness of issues that matter a great deal to me and to provoke and spark what I hope will be new conversations.
WL. The Jung Center of Houston is presenting DISASSOCIATION V, your first outdoor public work that will be on view through October 2025. This hand-carved, hand-painted wood sculpture will be like a mirror for everyone willing to see beyond themselves in a Center that values an examined life. What is the message you want to bring across with this piece and what other projects are you currently working on?
SF. This will be my most complicated installation/sculpture to date, and I am so grateful to The Jung Center for their beautiful invitation. I am also incredibly grateful to rootlab for their collaboration on the design, fabrication and installation plan.
DISASSOCIATION V is the latest of a series of sculptures first created and exhibited at Museum of East Texas in 2022. The series now includes works at various scales and in a range of materials, including used pallet separator board, acrylic, and now, marine plywood. This series depicts the feeling I experienced during a single, terrifying dissociative episode that occurred years ago and that still haunts me.
The message I want to bring across in this piece is beautifully expressed in a reflection on the series by John Handley PhD, who, as Executive Director of Museum of East Texas at that time, curated my solo exhibition, You Won’t See It Coming: “Sarah’s work stands in defiance to silence, demanding attention to what has been ignored, and to what is deep-seated, emotional and ever-present.”
John, now Associate Director of Exhibits at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, Illinois, has encouraged me and followed my work ever since.
I’ve also been offered a solo exhibition at Hardy & Nance Studios in Houston opening mid-November. This show will be a nice complement to The Jung Center exhibition. It will feature the very first DISASSOCIATION installation/sculpture and a variety of other works, some 2-D, some 3-D. Some works will be new and quite different from other works I’ve shown before.
I am also collaborating with a Houston filmmaker on an art performance + protest film centered on Project 2025. I wrote the script and this will be my first performance piece.
*Cover Image: Untitled, 2017. Oil on Canvas
Wendolyn Lozano Tovar es poeta y artista visual. Es autora de Tiempo de agua (Literal Publishing, 2007) y Como el mirlo (Literal Publishing, 2023)
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