So often the task of outfitting a home circles themes of longevity. What will, either materially or stylistically, stand the test of time. Whether it’s through interior design or the artwork we live side-by-side with like aesthetic life-partners. When it comes to choosing trappings for our intimate spaces, we often choose colors and shapes, lines and materials that speak to the meaning of the lives that unfold there, room by room.
But as we all know, nothing lasts forever. As much as humans may try to craft a legacy from their lives, we are all part of nature—and what is nature if not change itself?
No one understands this paradox more than artist and weaver Sarah Haskell. Her supremely handcrafted textile-driven artworks straddle the line between the enduring and the ephemeral. Best known for her wall weavings, Sarah’s tightly woven threads reveal quality at its finest, the work of a master’s fingers. Evocative of ancient textiles that have lasted centuries beyond their makers, there is a mysterious quality to the deep indigos that dominate her pallet and the sparse figures, words, shapes, and hues that make each one a universe unto itself. Spanning in dimension from a few inches to a few feet, these bespoke tapestries seem to bring the cosmos down to earth. “It’s okay to be lost,” she says. “It’s okay to be floating in that mystery—that’s what a lot of my work is about. The space of not being attached to what is concrete.”
Nowhere is this more evident than in the materials she chooses to work with. Threads she painstakingly spins by hand, dyes with organic plants, and weaves row by row like lines of poetry into bold yet quiet expanses seem to knit together the mysteries linking wild nature with the human spirit. “These materials are not permanent,” she explains. “I fight the art world on this. They want everything to be archival. But this attachment and longing for permanence is completely the opposite of what the actual world is. Nothing is permanent. We’re all constantly changing, molecule by molecule, as is everything around us.And I want my work to be in this universe of change.
Story—another site of enduring impermanence—plays a big role in Sarah’s work as well. As a narrative-driven artist there is a kind of paradoxical tension present in most of her work, even as her creative interests shifted over time. “In the very beginning I was inspired by nature,” she explains,“but later when I became a mom I was interested in making work around ancestors, family, relationships.” Some of her most popular pieces now, smooth gray rocks culled from the Maine shoreline suspended in hand-crocheted netting, seem to bridge these sources of inspiration. “There’s this rigid hard object I encase in something soft, malleable, simple…each one meant only for its own rock.” By suspending them in mid-air, too, Sarah tells a deeper tale about the ways we connect to nature and each other: precariousness highlights intimate yet improbable moments of connection as well as the sense that magic is afoot. A weighted stone levitated by tender threads. “I make work that’s personal,” she says, “but that’s not what drives it. I connect with a longing or a grief or a joy…something in myself that’s universal. That’s how others find their own longing and joy and stories in it too.
In many ways, these subtle emotional, relational, and universal meanings are at the heart of Sarah’s work: “The art is just a vehicle to get to that transformational place.” Lucky for us, her magic is available right here. For aesthetically minded seekers looking to add depth and simplicity to the enduring interiors of the home, Sarah’s textile art can be found at George Marshall Store Gallery in York and at sarahhaskell.com ▪
