sarah fansler lavin

This landscape is both sparse and cluttered, delicate and minimal. A physical space to explore, get lost in, engineering infinity, dissolving gravity. This piece relies as much on absence and shadow as it does on line.

In this piece I draw on the language of mapping. It is a broken landscape of peaks and valleys representing junctures and overcoming obstacles. Navigating routes, mapping our experiences, making choices at crossroads, these common metaphors link experiencing life with the notion of a journey. Mapping serves as a metaphor for searching, an implication of the unknown in wide, open spaces, and a trace of how we see where we've been.

This large scale stream of consciousness is a running internal dialogue tied to the sense of self, a discourse of shadows, boundaries and contradictions. The installation was built with the intention of being viewed from multiple vantage points, inside and out, especially to those walking past on the street listening to their own internal dialogue.

The primary material is 1” industrial cold rolled steel strapping scavenged from a shipyard. In the industry the strapping material is commonly used for bundling products together and securing pallet loads for transport or storage. It comes in rolls of 100’. The banding is an anodized blue/black, it is shiny and smooth and catches the light. The strapping is malleable, fluid, holds tension and has a high tensile strength.

in collaboration with Stephanie Wood.

In modernity, violence finds expression not only in social action, but also in omnipresent objects, facilities and urban structures.

Fences, walls, partitions: everything we encounter in public space can be regarded as public sculpture; for every object is the product of a process of material composition and formal design. All objects influence our perceptions, our movements, our feelings, and our thoughts. Public space is not designed by human beings alone, but is instead shaped by the boundaries between public and private, institutional and commercial.

In these works, i uncover the violence we encounter every day in scenarios of spatial and ideological demarcation, thus exposing the alleged neutrality of material and form. The supposedly clear distinction between objects and subjects becomes blurred.

On a personal level these pieces share and undercurrent of human trauma…being cut up, left out, locked in and stranded by the side of the road while life passes by.

it is the unforeseen trauma hidden underneath the skin or around the corner that i am speaking of

All of these materials are a reflection of my day to day consumption….riding my bike to work on the weekdays and in the woods on the weekends….The contents of my shopping cart.…I use discarded materials to reflect on ideas of the increasing materialism and obsolescence in our society and the inextricable relationship between production and consumption and the isolation that ensues. Also an undercurrent is the empty bed or the stray matress on the side of the road, its once owner forced to leave, not in control of their next move.

I come from a family of fisherman. The net speaks to abundance. The net teaches us about loss and letting go. It allows desirable fish to be captured and those that are not to pass thru.

My first impulse was to develop a language of forms that could communicate the feeling of a different dimension of space-time, thinking the world as a constellation of related forms, places, ideas and people

I seek to create interior volumes that are delineated by web-like interconnected lines. The lines express a fluidity as well as an awkward geometry,

I seek to draw on the language of mapping that tap into emotional spaces not just the physical, a way to sort thru the tangle of memories

Much of my work is realized upon installation, this is an important time for me although much of it is conceptualized earlier

waypoints is an installation referencing how we navigate thru our physical space. Working in 3-d and directly on the wall i use the vernacular of common building materials to map coordinates or routes adapted from GPS data collected when working on my brothers gill net boat in SE Alaska.

CUT, BURN, DRILL, GRIND, SAND, SHEAR, ABRADE.

I actually did not make any work specifically for this show. The installation is a secondary result of making. The net result of cutting is two products….. the waste or excess material and the desired product. The waste is the result of the subtractive (material removing) and this is what i am revealing.

I am a metal worker and these are the tools of the trade. All of these pieces are the result of work, the byproduct of effort. They document my time, the material and process i employ, leaving its traces. They are in various states of exhaustion and reveal its consumer: traces of wood pitch, tarpaper, plastic, ferrous and non ferrous metals.

I do not work in an overly scripted way; rather the focus is on the experience of living thru the work. The content resides in its intentions rather than as a static and enduring object.

I am interested in time, process and material. Emphasizing the process and its making so that the residue is the form.

Tides are one of the most reliable phenomena in the world. The tide comes and goes two times a day is one of the few predictable events in an otherwise chaotic world. 

Tides are waves that move thru the ocean in response to gravitational forces exerted by the sun and the moon and the rotation of the earth. Tides originate in the ocean and progress toward the coastlines where they appear as the regular rise and fall of the sea surface.

Rise and Fall is an acknowledgement of the day to day, the underlying rhythm of its ups and downs, its dry spells and floods. Furthermore, i wanted to reference the history of this area, once tidal flats.

Much of the materials seen here are found on construction sites. The palette is the material itself. Subtle changes in height, mass and texture inform the work.

These pieces are an exploration of the idea of edge, line and boundary. The installation represents the lowest level of the tide, the exposed shore. This is the area between the high and low tides, where an abundance of marine life thrive. These inhabitants are adapted to an environment of harsh extremes of both land and sea, subject to submergence, desiccation or carried away by rough waters. Unfortunately it is also a place where humans makes their greatest impact.

All forces exist in pairs and their interaction is equal and opposite. There are no isolated forces. One cannot exist without the other: White/black Solid/void Light/shadow Round/square Birth/death
Most of my inspiration comes from salvaging building materials from construction sites. The palette is the materials itself. Subtle changes in height, mass and texture inform the work. The patina of use is clearly visible: smudgy fingerprints, slightly rounded edges, and small creases from coiling and uncoiling.

Armed with a calculator and a welder: These sculptures reflect on the  passage of time and capture its irreversible continuum.  I am attempting to record the systems of reckoning time, the cycles, sequence of days, months and years.

Bangles: forged steel schedule 40 heating pipe.

pendants; forged steel washers.

Interiors: A modern design aesthetic inspired by geometric shapes. Metal work is minimal and focuses on the subtleties of each form-drawing compliment from dissimilar materials.  Industrial dimensional metal, round pipe, square tubing. Aluminum and steel exterior, copper and brass interiors. Steel cable chokers with magnetic clasps.

Building like everything have a life cycle. When buidings reach the end of their useful life they are typically demolished and its contents hauled of to a landfill. Deconstruction focuses on giving new life to these materials.

All of the materials in these sculpture have been recovered from a building that is itself being repurposed. The wood once a fence to keep people out, a railing to keep people in. I have created sculpture that is stripped down to a restrictive vocabulary of geometric shapes, closely resembling contemporary architecture.

Theses sculptures are determined by basic geometric shapes as outline. I use one single component for design unity and emphasize on what is absent: the space around the object.

Manifestation of a recurring dream of teeth falling out.  Cast concrete, forged steel teeth are caged, representing our instincts, our animal defenses and thus lack of power. Teeth,  apart from DNA are the next important source for identifying a body after we die.