sarahjess hurt
Bozeman, Montana
About Sarahjess Hurt
Sarahjess was born in rural Georgia. The tactile nature of her art was borne from her mother’s alternative teaching style. Because Sarahjess had dyslexia and attention problems, she struggled in school. Her mother, a painter herself, taught Sarahjess through non-traditional means.
Both of Sarahjess’s grandmothers were quilters, and her great-grandmother left her sewing box to her when she died. When she was eighteen, Sarahjess opened the box and found little unfinished quilting projects. Immediately she felt connected to this woman who had long passed. In this way, the women in Sarahjess’s family influenced her. She now works with vintage fabrics, and through them she feels connected to her history.
Artist Statement
My work is to dissect a love of the past and alteration of systems that involve the relationships between myself, my family, and other aspects of how I was raised and where. It has been an investigation of the following, reciprocation, replication, influence, experience, the mechanical, as well as the biological. From this practice, what I see is that my viewpoint is a particularly strong process of “working through:” working through autobiographical experiences in order to parce them down from raw emotions of myself to a voided “fill in the blank” for the viewer to place themselves in a situation of recollection, of their own memories, thoughts, fixations, obsessions, experiences, over all general moments that resonate as important.
Obsessive collecting, feeling a need to have a tangible object in place of a memory. Those objects give some connection to a past I never got to have. I choose to use tactile materials to explain my thoughts and emotions in my work.
I went to graduate school to become a real artist, but it took graduating, having a child and losing a sense of myself to find out what being a real artist is. A real artist enjoys the small moments in the wee hours of morning, and in that space of time they get to find happiness in the making process. The outcome may not always be the same, but that feeling you get from making is. I consider myself a collector of the random, a curator of the mundane. I make unique pieces from upcycled found objects; mostly discarded debris. I incorporate sewn elements and recycled jewelry in my pieces. To me, it’s not about building a monument, it’s about a moment captured by a small memento.
Sarahjess Hurt
Sarahjess was born in rural Georgia. The tactile nature of her art was borne from her mother’s alternative teaching style. Because Sarahjess had dyslexia and attention problems, she struggled in school. Her mother, a painter herself, taught Sarahjess through non-traditional means.
Both of Sarahjess’s grandmothers were quilters, and her great-grandmother left her sewing box to her when she died. When she was eighteen, Sarahjess opened the box and found little unfinished quilting projects. Immediately she felt connected to this woman who had long passed. In this way, the women in Sarahjess’s family influenced her. She now works with vintage fabrics, and through them she feels connected to her history.
Artist Statement
My work is to dissect a love of the past and alteration of systems that involve the relationships between myself, my family, and other aspects of how I was raised and where. It has been an investigation of the following, reciprocation, replication, influence, experience, the mechanical, as well as the biological. From this practice, what I see is that my viewpoint is a particularly strong process of “working through:” working through autobiographical experiences in order to parce them down from raw emotions of myself to a voided “fill in the blank” for the viewer to place themselves in a situation of recollection, of their own memories, thoughts, fixations, obsessions, experiences, over all general moments that resonate as important.
Obsessive collecting, feeling a need to have a tangible object in place of a memory. Those objects give some connection to a past I never got to have. I choose to use tactile materials to explain my thoughts and emotions in my work.
I went to graduate school to become a real artist, but it took graduating, having a child and losing a sense of myself to find out what being a real artist is. A real artist enjoys the small moments in the wee hours of morning, and in that space of time they get to find happiness in the making process. The outcome may not always be the same, but that feeling you get from making is. I consider myself a collector of the random, a curator of the mundane. I make unique pieces from upcycled found objects; mostly discarded debris. I incorporate sewn elements and recycled jewelry in my pieces. To me, it’s not about building a monument, it’s about a moment captured by a small memento.
Sarahjess Hurt
other works
Sarahjess Hurt. Balancing Act clay, concrete, foam 13.5 x 3.5 x 4
