Associate Professor Sarah Marshall has a solo exhibition, Crowded Air, September 7-October 31, at the Hoover Public Library Friends Gallery in Hoover, Alabama. Marshall’s transfers her images to fabric using photographic and print techniques such as cyanotype, silkscreen, and relief printing, and dyed using traditional tied and sewn resist techniques. She then collages the fabric elements together through sewing and appliqué.
“In this work,” Marshall writes, “tones of blue, images of the eye, and collage assembly suggest the nighttime activities of the human imagination. The eye symbolizes many attributes. Open, it suggests vigilance, clairvoyance, judgment, or moral conscience. Closed it can mean deceit, willful blindness, absence, or submission. Altered text references the constant blur of voices, internal and external, that entangle with fantasy and myth at the edge of sleep. Disembodied facial features and limbs combined with animal bodies serve as metaphors for the fragility and impermanence of the self.”
Sarah Marshall is an associate professor of art and coordinates the printmaking program in the UA Department of Art and Art History. Marshall is interested in language, history, science, and the natural world. Using printmaking, photography and drawing, she blends observable reality with belief, imaginary stories and memory. Processes such as repetition, reversal, layering and transfer serve as metaphors for our daily sensory and mental experiences, and our relationships with ourselves and with each other. Marshall earned a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and an MA and MFA from The University of Iowa. She is a member of the Paperworkers Local printmaking cooperative in Birmingham and has participated in workshops and residencies at the Taller de Gráfica Experimental de La Habana, the Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium, Tamarind Institute, Penland School of Craft, and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in public and private collections across the U.S.
To find out more about The University of Alabama’s programs in studio art and art history, visit our Degree Programs page.