Past Resident
Sarah Elizabeth Cornejo
Sarah Elizabeth Cornejo’s sculptural work utilizes the possibilities within hybridity to speak of a hypothetical place where humans have evolved into hybrid beings with animals, insects, and discarded human-made materials. The resulting physical evolution of this voluntary merging challenges social discomfort around bodies that are not easily categorized by blurring the boundaries between animal and human, living and dead, animate and inanimate. Her work aims to disrupt notions of human hierarchy, testing the phenomenon between humanity, mammality and technology in a chimeric future.
“The underpinnings of my work develop out of Latin-American magical realism, abject theory, critical race theory, and environmental distress to investigate notions of human exceptionalism, as well as humanity’s trajectory. With my work, I aim to create more space for those, like myself, who straddle identities and cultures, and use that hybrid state as an opportunity for reckoning.”
Lucille
concrete, steel, earth, wood glue, tin can, pig jaw, saw dust, deer antler, tire tube, citrine, epoxy, acrylic paint
2019
28” x 10” x 12”
Q&A with Sarah Elizabeth Cornejo (from Crosstown Arts newsletter, May 6, 2021)
Crosstown Arts Spring 2021 resident artist Sarah Elizabeth Cornejo is an interdisciplinary artist based in Memphis. Her work proposes a futuristic mythology for humanity where humans have evolved into hybrid beings with animals and insects, challenging notions of human exceptionalism by disrupting the binaries between humanity, mammality, technology, and animacy.
Sarah is currently a co-founder and co-curator of BASEMENT, a provisional artist-run space in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her work has been shown throughout the eastern United States and internationally, in venues that include the Mint Museum, Ackland Art Museum, and Duke University, among others. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio from UNC-Chapel Hill and her BA in Studio Art and English Literature from Davidson College. She is currently a 10-month resident at Crosstown Arts and a 2021 New Public Sculpture Fellow with UrbanArt Commission in Memphis.
Crosstown Arts registrar Jesse Butcher caught up with Sarah to discuss how she sources materials for her sculptures, the role of myths and fairytales in her work, and what literature inspires her.
Jesse: Your recent sculptural works explore how humanity’s actions cause an alternate phenomenon of a merged human condition. What prompted you to begin this body of work? How did you develop this lexicon of materials?
Sarah: I first began this body of work from a personal place of feeling in between two cultures and belonging wholly to neither. My father grew up in Arequipa, Perú, and came to the United States after marrying my mother, who is from South Carolina. Growing up, I spoke Spanish with him and English with my mom, while bearing witness to the damage inflicted upon my father through facing a changed reality in this country.
When he immigrated, he was no longer able to practice medicine, and, among many other things, I think that made him desperate for my sister and me to have opportunities without obstacles. I pass as white, so once I started taking standardized tests at school, he had a talk with me about making sure I only checked the “white” box and never the “Latinx/Hispanic” box. Growing up with that mindset, I felt a mixture of being very proud of being Latina, while also not feeling Latina enough in some circles. Then, in white circles, even as recently as graduate school, I was getting comments about how I don’t look like what people would expect a Latina woman to look like, delivered with this confidence that implied they feel they are talking to a white woman who will tolerate and relate to that kind of micro-aggression.
The feeling of not belonging, one I still struggle with, got me thinking about how complex and layered identity is. Why do people feel the need to concretely know “what” you are? Why are they so uncomfortable when they are unsure? What power lies in occupying an undefined space? I felt that hybridity, two disparate things coming together to make something divergent, was a rich opportunity for breaking down binaries and cultivating the undefined space between them. From there, I began to use my work and research as a way to understand or cope with anxiety about the future, which brought up questions about the ramifications of humans placing themselves atop the animacy hierarchy, how this ties into abjection, the way that it plays into our definition of self and other, and the environmental and social consequences of this. Humans are rapidly heading toward a breaking point, and this work is a way to both cope with that and provide an alternative where we don’t have the privilege of pressing reset, but have to cope and compost what has happened on earth and reanimate it or create something new from it.
In terms of my materials, I was very close to my grandfather in South Carolina growing up. He was a forester and had an almost religious relationship to nature, which had an enormous effect on how I viewed my place in the world. I came downstairs to go to school one morning, and he was holding a live timber rattlesnake because he wanted me to get a good look at the pits under its eyes that were characteristic of pit vipers. Where I’m from, if you find a rattlesnake on your property, you usually kill it for not absurd reasons — people have animals, kids, dogs, etc., and rattlesnake bites are serious. The anti-venom to treat a bite is close to $9,000-$10,000. Picking up a snake like that safely is really risky, but seeing it done is also pretty amazing. There’s an awesome mutual respect.
It’s a rule for me in my work that what I use has to have been discarded so that what I create is a reanimation of something cast off that is composted into a new being. One of my sculptures uses alligator skin, which I ended up with after an alligator in a pond on someone’s property in South Carolina killed their dog, so they shot the gator, ate it, and saved some of the skin. That’s not something I would ever do, or even condone, but it’s again a material now saturated with this story and this human-animal relationship that feels important to imbue the work with. This animal’s life didn’t run its natural course, and there’s nothing I can do about it except take this small piece that I have and create a new being from it that is impregnated with this story.
Similarly, I live in a neighborhood where there are constantly houses being flipped. There’s rubble around them from people taking something apart and building something new. I don’t know how gentrification necessarily fits into my work right now, but when I pass these sites, one thing I can do is take these items as evidence and reanimate them. In that way, maybe they function as fossils or attempts to preserve something that’s already lost.
A lot of my materials come to me from far less macabre means, whether it’s me obsessively collecting coquina shells on a beach or from gifts that people drop off at my house or studio, or even mail to me. For example, the pig hairs I use in my work come from back home where my cousin has a pig named Mathilda who sheds these incredible, bristly hairs when it’s hot in the summer. I love that aspect of the work, both the slow collecting and the community collaboration.
I also have to say that I have an abject fascination with these materials and the way they demonstrate parts of living and dying on earth laid out in a way that humans have subverted for themselves by putting so much distance between us and actually interacting with our body’s by-products or even decomposition.
In your series “A Close Woman Friend,” two very striking drawings include highly rendered rats interacting with humans —“My Crumpled Rose, My Mauve, My Velvet Black” and “Small Girl, Ella.” These works prompted me to remember Paula Rego’s printmaking work, especially “Three Blind Mice” from 1989. Rego was deeply invested in myths and fairytales as well as the activities of the unconscious. In your current practice exploring hybridity would you consider the works a type of myth-building?
This is a really interesting question. I think I would say that, rather than myth-building, they were the beginning of breaking down previously understood truths to make way for a different reality or way of thinking. I did those two drawings as part of my undergraduate thesis. In college, I majored in English and Studio Art, thinking I was going to be a writer, but it actually turned out that going to literature really helped shift me out of some of my own previously held beliefs that I’d grown up with and had never examined for myself. I started looking at fairytales and novels that I’d grown up reading and was horrified at the messages I had been passively ingesting that were unconsciously being internalized as ways of shaping my own ideas of gender and self. These works functioned as a means of unraveling all of that. Each piece in “A Close Woman Friend” was a reckoning with a different text and its ramifications upon my own sense of self or the pressure I felt to perform my gender in prescribed ways. I think doing this laid some groundwork for my graduate work that departed from these binaries altogether.
Works like “And We Will Know This Place for the First Time” and “A Room of My Own” seem to be reclaiming space and defining one’s own environment and surroundings. I’m reminded of Gloria Anzaldúa’s “El Mundu Zordo” and her writing concerning the “recreation of the self and a reconstruction of society.” How important is space and environment to your practice? Does it play a role in how you prefer the work presented to the public?
I am deeply flattered that my work conjures a relationship to Gloria Anzaldúa for you. She is someone I always go back to when I’m feeling lost. Space and environment are always ongoing conversations for me that I’m trying to work through. When “And We Will Know This Place for the First Time” opened, I was watching the way that people interacted with the work and was surprised and somewhat bothered to see people leaning on the pedestals of sculptures, or smelling them, or taking selfies with them. These works feel like beings to me, so this seemed like an invasion of space and overtaking of some dynamic at play between work being viewed and viewing.
On the other hand, it was hilarious to see people try to do the same to “The Room of My Own,” which contained a living garden and was a structure made entirely of human hair reminiscent of a vulva. That sculpture was meant to allow viewers to look, but the space inside wasn’t for them. Since then, I’ve been really interested in what it means for a sculpture to be an object as well as a space to be observed but also experienced. New sculptures that I’m working on have irregular bodies and sharp points, or are small and sitting plainly on the floor. I’m interested to see how viewers can be made to be present in the space with the work, careful how they move around it, or how the sculpture itself dictates the viewing distance.
“The One Who Gives Meaning and Consequence” was a snake-y sculpture that’s been the beginning of a new series for me and begins to address issues of space and agency, as well as blended cultures, with the metaphor of the snake. When this sculpture was photographed, the reflective beads that coated it lit up and the resulting image completely departed from reality and only existed on a cell phone in this fraught and limited virtual realm. In a current sculpture I’m working on, I’m pushing this idea further. How can sculpture keep you from being able to take it with you in an image, or offer you something that can only exist when you’re in the room with it?
Recently your interest has expanded into creating larger sculptures as well as public sculptures. Would this affect the material choices of your gallery practice versus a public sculpture? Or would you allow them to, as sculptor Anne Truitt says, “disintegrate in time at something comparable to the rate at which we human beings disintegrate”?
I love this question, and this is something I think about a lot because it has so much to do with human nature generally. This brings up questions for me about decomposition, waste, human exceptionalism, and how humans, for the most part, cannot fathom the idea that they would ever fully cease to exist. What would it mean to put thought, labor, and resources into work that would decompose and eventually be destroyed? It ties into universal questions about the world to come, after-lives, or if we simply decompose back into the earth. I would even go so far as to tie it into social media, this need to record our lives and the thought that even after we are gone, our experiences, accomplishments, and stories will be immortalized in cyberspace. All materials ultimately have a lifespan, but wood, waste, or natural materials have one that is far more visceral perhaps because they remind us of our own lifespan. The feeling that question elicits in me is a much more interesting place out of which to make work than permanence.
Literature has consistently influenced your practice. What have you been reading recently? Are there any texts that you would recommend to other artists?
I just finished reading “The Powers of Horror” by Julia Kristeva and “Animacies” by Mel Y. Chen and am really interested in Latino Futurism at the moment. I have “Her Body and Other Parties” by Carmen Maria Machado coming in the mail. I don’t know that I have books that I would recommend generally, since everyone’s research is different. For me, I think theory and novels are equally important. Transformative, good writing gets me outside of my own head and worldview, and theory helps me understand why. For my own practice, I always keep a few books with me in my studio that I repeatedly return to: “Borderlands” by Gloria Anzaldúa,“ “Staying With the Trouble” by Donna Haraway, “The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton” by Lucille Clifton, and “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez.
“Borderlands” is a fearlessly vulnerable account of difference. Anzaldúa’s metaphor, specific to her own Chicana identity, is applicable as a metaphor for identities that straddle binaries more generally and a fascinating examination of the effects of religion and culture on social dynamics. I love the way she speaks about religion and culture seeking to explain and thwart the supernatural and how the female body, which bleeds every month but does not die, is therefore the other, which is feared and policed.
I came to Donna Haraway after starting this series and feel a kinship to her proposed future of playing the slow game of communing with other creatures. She departs from her previous ideas of the cyborg in “Staying with the Trouble” and creates her own new mythology on Earth, calling for a “multispecies cats cradle” type of kinship with beings, asserting the importance of sitting with what humans as a species have done and have caused rather than looking to salvific futures.
Lucille Clifton’s poetry brings me back to my body and investigates that mind-body relationship intentionally. Her poem “To My Uterus” is gut-wrenching; it functions as an examination of self and what that self is when we remove gendered expectations of the body. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” resonates with me on many levels. After moving to South Carolina as a teenager, I was in this incredibly tiny rural town where I was surrounded by my mother’s family, which had lived there for centuries. There is such a deep mythology to a place like that which has existed so insularly and has such a layered history, but with that seclusion also comes slow social progress, which was hard to reconcile as a Latina surrounded only by white family. As an adult, I’m realizing that with that progress comes the dispersion and dissolution of that seclusion. It’s both a necessary and inevitable destruction. As Márquez states, “Races condemned to one hundred years of solitude do not have a second opportunity on earth.”
Thank you so much for such an in-depth inquiry into your practice!
