Sarah Edmands Martin

DESIGNER

Associate Professor
University of Notre Dame

Designer, artist, and scholar working at the intersection of visual communication design, critical fabulation, and media aesthetics.

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UIC School of Design guest juror

m(other)ing exhibition open

forthcoming talk at Cornell

SARAHEDMANDS

SARAHEDMANDSMARTIN

SARAHEDMANDS

Site-specific Installation

Drawing, hand-drawn typography, site-specific installation2014

A site-specific installation of drawings and hand-painted typography in dialogue with archival histories of women’s subjugation.

Concept

The Birdsell Art Installation Project opened a 12,000 square foot mansion for artists to repurpose. Constructed in the 1890’s, The Birdsell Mansion sat vacant for several decades. In October of 2014 it was reopened so artists could invoke a uniquely intimate and haunting experience for those adventurous enough to visit.

For this installation, I collected and curated narrative experiences from the South Bend community, interweaving multiple perspectives of local mythology, contemporary community identity, and the city's engagement with history. This manifested as dark folk lore vignettes: a reflection of the Birdsell family's history (particularly of its women) as a darkly constructed identity that, as we look back upon it, cants and fades under our gaze. The viewer is also asked to participate in knitting together an overarching narrative.

site-specific installation
painting
calligraphy
archival histories

“I wanted to topple the hierarchies that determine how we know things and who people are in the world and so I was thinking about the relationship between history and the violence of the archive as well as its fiction and its elasticity.”

Saidiya Hartman MoMA interview, ft. Venus in Two Acts
Gallery 214: Critical Fabulations. 2021

Read more from Saidiya Hartman here.

“One of the things that I was really struggling with [...] was the violence of the archive and the way power is registered through absences and silences, the obliteration of lives, all the things that we could not know.”