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Sarah's artist profile
Artist Profile
Sarah Clough is a visual artist, writer, teacher, and curator living in Baltimore, Maryland. While a graduate student at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Clough was awarded a GradEX solo show and her paintings were also featured in the annual First Year Juried Show. She has exhibited across the United States, in California, New Mexico, Oklahoma, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Virginia, and South Korea. She is a recent Denis Diderot Grant recipient from the Chateau d'Orquevaux Residency in Orquevaux, France, and an Artist’s Grant recipient from the Vermont Studio Center. She is currently weaving her writing and visual arts practices together in ways that are unique to each discipline.
Clough’s work begins with her creative writing and poetry, and is like spelunking into a verbal cavern, where the glowing and fading forms and texts alternately reveal themselves or remain hidden. The form the text assumes responds to the content of the phrase; sometimes it’s measured and precise, sometimes it’s scrawled and imperfect. Meant to be seen in sunlight, ultraviolet light and in the dark, viewers control their experience: what is illuminated, what is unearthed, or what remains buried or unexamined. These experiential drawings, paintings, murals and installations demonstrate the subjectivity of perception and the deficiencies of language – its potential for vacuity, arbitrariness, and incomprehensibility. More importantly, her work also addresses language’s innate musicality, its flexibility, and its joy. Inspired by physics, chemistry, and biology, her practice connects visual art with language and science, illuminating an interplay of semiotics, poetry, light, and the connections between them. It is at this intersection where she finds meaning in this world governed by light and communicative processes.
