Sarah Houghton–February 2011–Artist of the Month

Artist Statement

This is the telling of a story. The story is my life. The story is my family, my history, my memory, my body, my blood and bones. In trying to keep myself safe as a child, I created isolated places in my environment: a small unused cupboard, dank and full of spiders with a doorway too small for my brothers to climb through. I made it habitable with a lamp, cushions, a blanket, my drawing book and books, books, books. I built miniature houses, equipped with tiny furniture, paintings, clothing, all the stuff of an everyday life and here I played out scenarios of the life I dreamed of and the person I dreamed of being. At an early age, I developed an eating disorder that at times has severely compromised my health. I have lived most of my life feeling cut off and disconnected with others and myself. I feel I have always lived two selves: a private one and a public one but for me the separation of the two can have extreme consequences.
My art practice today is about exploring this disconnection and to see if in some way I can integrate these two disparate sides. The materials I use are pen, ink, graphite, charcoal, paper, video and my own body. I am intent on exploring both my physical and emotional bodies. I have started with small, intimate and careful drawings of the inner world I inhabit, moving my sketchbook contents from the private to the public realm. The inclusion of text is of key importance and is intrinsic to the drawing by shape, form and content. They are the writings of my uncensored thoughts, each one of equal importance. Then in moving to larger drawings of abstracted organs of the body the distress has become more palpable; the liver, the heart, the pancreas and lungs are concrete things that are affected by my eating disorder and this self-created distance. Each drawing begins with a single mark, each subsequent mark in response to the surrounding marks or empty space. Thus the drawings are built and as I work on them each day, that day’s emotional content becomes integral to the drawing.
Finally, I have begun to explore the use of video as a means of expressing my inner self through movement. Having been a dancer for many years of my early life this seemed a natural progression and has given me a way to begin to feel my body in motion; to connect physically with this newly informed vision of myself. The choreography is spontaneous and I am moving in response to the drawings, keeping them uppermost in my mind as I dance. In studying the intricate ways in which my body lives I am exploring, through the medium of drawing and movement, this process of reintegration and habitation.
 Video