Sunday Artist, A Selbe, Sarah Hollis Perry

Well, I had the name Sarah Hollis written in a notebook to look up, but i could not remember what she did that made me want to remember her. I still don't know if this is the woman i wanted to find or not but this is who i discovered. Her name is Sarah Hollis Perry, she earned a BA in art History from Smith College and a diploma from the School of the museum of Fine arts Boston.

The first thing i saw of her work i though was extremely odd. It was Tree Sweaters. Yes sweaters for trees. It seems she was knitting these sweaters for trees from plastic bags and surveyors tape to put around trees that were planned to be cut down for whatever reason. I still see this as a very odd thing to do even though her intentions behind it are quite clear.

I was much more interested in some collaboration pieces that she preformed with her daughter Rachel Perry Welty. I cannot get images up here of the work so here is the link: http://www.sarahhollisperry.com/

Their piece called Erasure was preformed at Lousiana Tech University School of Art. Her daughter Rachel sifts flour over a square composition of Playmobil toys and objects. When done, she picks all of the pieces up and it becomes this sort of drawing or painting of flour. The shapes and pieces remind of me of those childhood books where you had to find one object on a page, like Where's Waldo. It is interesting to see the color difference between the white flour and the black rug beneath. Sarah then comes and vacuums the artwork off the of the floor. For me it really speaks about the play of a child and the motherly instincts to clean. It is interesting how temporary the work is, if the flour wasn't vacuumed up it would have been disturbed by something else.

Another piece that they did together that i find interesting is called Sweet Onions. In this piece Mother and daughter sit next to each other and simultaneously tell a version of the same family recipe. They tell the recipe in different way, words and at different speeds. I can't help but think how challenging it would be to speak at the same time and not get terribly confused, as it is so confusing to hear them talk at the same time. I think this piece really speaks about interpretation and how everyone thinks in different ways.