maps.sarahharlan

“It’s interesting that you bring up coming back here and trying to articulate certain conditions and losing words. That’s exactly how I’ve been feeling, so now I’m back to just drawing. In the past, all my work has evolved from one painting to the next. Little by little I’d bring more and more elements into the painting. I worked with this whole idea that the drawn marks behave as characters, individuals. The characters keep evolving and changing through the painting. But I think with the last group of paintings, I have been able to take this language that I’ve been developing, in all its many parts, and really bring it to a head, almost like a crescendo. I was really trying to make some sense out of this situation we’re in and I felt I had the means, that language to do so, but then afterward when I went back into the studio to make new work, as clearly as everything had crystallized and come together previously, it all disintegrated and fell out from under me. I think those cycles of clarity and confusion are just part of the creative process. The map and the layering and the reason I was actually physically making the paintings all had had a clear and specific meaning in the work.”