Today we’d like to introduce you to Sarah Julig.
Sarah, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
I grew up in a cabin in the woods in Alaska. My dad built our house and it was a constantly evolving space. My family did a lot of fishing, hunting, upcycling/repairing of found objects, gardening, and berry picking. Nature was, and is, very important to me. Global warming has been more rapid in the arctic, so I have watched the glaciers shrink rapidly in my lifetime, with the rise of mega forest fires that blanket the sky with smoke every summer. My parents were into a lot of new age things, and I have definitely inherited some of those qualities. They used to listen to Art Bell and I remember hearing weird UFO prophets talk about end times and earth changes, and it made me fear the end of the world as a child. My family is very loving but Alaska can be a dark place and has a high rate of violence and addiction for such a small community. I focused on art early on as a way to figure out my own understanding and relation to the world.
Travel and exposure to other cultures and ways of understanding the world has also had a big impact on my work. I have been fortunate to spend a lot of time studying overseas or traveling or working abroad. I spent two years in Finland studying art as an exchange student from AK, four years in NYC making art and running an eco cleaning/organizing business, 6 months in Nicaragua as an artists assistant for a Daniel Pulido’s mosaic project in the Museum of Mitos y Leyandas in Leon, and went to Greenland as a cultural delegate for Alaska as a teen. I fell for ceramics while in grad school at UC Davis. Before that point I was making a lot of work using found objects and trash from the streets of NYC to assemble sculpture and I wanted to find a way to make my own components and connect my work more closely with my drawings. Ceramics terrified me, but I persevered. After graduation, I got a month-long mentoring residency at the Gyeonggi Ceramics Biennale in Korea. In Korea, I worked with Canadian artist Neil Forest as a mentor along with many other contemporary ceramicists. I spent the next year traveling and working part-time in southeast Asia and Taiwan.
For the last four years I have been in LA, working as a ceramics teacher for incredibly talented adults with disabilities and making my own work. I have also recently started a side business, Bell Compass Tonics, making medicinal tonics and tinctures using primarily Reishi sourced from CA and Chaga mushrooms I picked in Alaska with my brother. As social as LA can be, a lot of my time here has been a very internal journey, focused on healing and finding balance. For more than ten years, I have struggled with chronic pain, and at times it has been incapacitating. Finally, it has forced me to slow down, as I learned that pushing myself through my pain was breaking my body. It’s been a journey working through this and finding ways to heal myself and pace myself differently. This journey has changed how I think about my work, as the illness of our bodies and its often direct relation to destruction in the natural world has become a prominent focus for me.
Can you give our readers some background on your art?
My sculptures and drawings are sculptural science fiction.
My work is usually complex and uses natural form and patterns as a starting point.
Although inspired by the natural world, the work is grounded in its relation to the human body. Sometimes my work is made to be used or worn or suggests a possible use. For example: re-imagining ceramic hot water bottles as alien organs or wounds, using ceramic and glass beaded garments as a stand-in for the human body, or gathering people’s drawings of their body sensations into an open-sourced animation.
I want to create artifacts that prefigure a culture of care and caretaking for ourselves and the natural world. Can we learn to stop viewing ourselves as separate from our environment? Can we realize we carry the wounds we give to each other and the earth in our bodies? My goal is to convey an emotional tone and pose a visual puzzle or question to the viewer. If such a culture exists today, would we recognize it or view it as alien?
Artists rarely, if ever pursue art for the money. Nonetheless, we all have bills and responsibilities and many aspiring artists are discouraged from pursuing art due to financial reasons. Any advice or thoughts you’d like to share with prospective artists?
We have a lot of challenges today. Certainly money is one of them, and having it makes things easier. We all have to try as best we can and it can be tiring. However, ultimately the game of gathering financial resources seems to fade in the face of the larger challenges facing us. The environment and nature are the issues that concern me the most, and I am trying to work towards a life lived in right relation with nature. This does involve spending a lot less money, learning and applying DIY skills, and re-using or recycling waste materials into my work whenever possible.
Ultimately I don’t see any difference between humans and nature. We are part of nature and need to play by its rules. Everything we put into the earth comes back to our bodies. Our bodies carry the burden of all the harm we have done to each other and the planet. Everything we throw away comes back into our food. I like to try to break down that divide by forcing viewers to imagine these natural forms as part of their bodies, or in recent work as objects or organs they use to comfort their bodies.
We have so many problems in out world. It’s pretty overwhelming, especially in LA where the day to day can feel pretty apocalyptic. I like the anarchist concept of prefiguration that we have to actively work to build the world we want to see inside the world that we have.
What’s the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
I have a show coming up at the Elephant art space in Glassell park in March. Come and see! My collaborators Nancy Wong, Elizabeth Maldari and I will also be hosting a series of workshops dealing with healing, climate grief, and making paper incense using plant materials. Ecca Echo will be performing at the opening. I have been more active on Instagram than my website lately, so check there for the most recent updates of shows or events. You could also buy some of my tinctures or art.
Contact Info:
- Website: sarahjulig.info
- Instagram: @sarahjulig
Image Credit:
Sarah Julig, Nancy Wong, animation produced by crowd-sourced images
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