Check Out Sabrina Drescher’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sabrina Drescher.

Hi Sabrina, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
To start: exactly a year ago, I was a full-time student in Claremont, CA. Enrolled and living on campus with seven other girls in a shared dorm, ready to graduate in May. I had just finished my thesis on trauma-responsive tattoos and body agency and was also tattooing part-time downtown. I had also just found out that my genetic illness had gotten significantly worse, and needed to start planning for pretty serious heart surgery. I was completely dependant on my college’s support for housing, food, transportation, community, education, and living overall. On March 13th, my school’s administration told us that we needed to leave. On March 17th, I packed all of my belongings into an uber XL to temporarily live in an apartment that some people I barely knew found for me in central LA, with a roommate I had never met. When I arrived there, everything stopped around me, and my entire life became that apartment. I spent two months quarantined in that room, with just a mattress and cardboard boxes. I had no fucking clue what was going to happen next. Since then, I have moved apartments three times and three different underground studios. Fast forward to now. I am in the process of officially opening up a tattoo studio with my business partner, Jayna, in Echo Park, where we are aimed at creating a Queer/BIPOC inclusive community space for artists and tattooers.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
My artwork has always been paralleled with my own physical and mental illness and has been the one consistency with healing. I have a chronic genetic condition and have been in different types of physical and psychological therapy and treatment since I was four, most recently have been dealing with an aortic aneurysm and symptoms of Marfan Syndrome, depression, anxiety, ADHD, anorexia, and a nice cocktail of “diagnoses that all seem to feed off of each other. The constant obstacle is me, my body, and my thoughts. There have been ebbs and flows of life-threatening physical and mental health conditions. My ability and the ways that I overestimate or compensate stand in conflict with ableism and efforts to” prove” myself or others wrong, which leads to overwork and falling short on my unrealistic expectations. Since Covid started, in some ways, it feels like everyone has matched my level of stress and chaos that I feel like I’m always in. My default for some reason seems to be survival mode. I’ve done bed rest, confinement, medical fear, isolation, strange treatments, and loss of control, so many things (That I’m sure we all have gone through in our own individual lives, but never so collectively. Now everyone is feeling it.

Rather than previously, when my world would stop while everyone else’s kept moving. I love to do as much as possible to counteract that energy and I cope by being restless. I know that I’ll look back on my summer of walking 2 miles to a studio in East Hollywood each week and working for 10 hours in windowless warehouse studios, or all of the waking hours spent drawing and drawing, I forget about how hard I’ve worked, and how restless I am, especially when I’m experiencing anxiety. It seems that whenever I loosen my grip on the steering wheel, things come so much smoother and work out. I used to fight that a lot, and with the pandemic and so many life changes in the past year, but also in my entire life. With freelancing, starting my post-grad life, and opening a shop, I experienced roadblocks when I tried to control everything or predict the future. Everything that I have in loving abundance now is something that I didn’t plan for, but that arrived as a result of not just hard work but also letting go, taking risks, and trusting myself. I have always known that my life was driven by creating art for others, and I can always turn back to that core in the face of challenges, and I welcome challenges to prepare me for the next level.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am obsessed with the body and everything that word seems to imply. Everything that I make is about that relationship to the “self” and the constantly shifting and transforming body. My work is very autobiographical, focusing on my internal and external relationships. The tattooes that I am currently designing are based off of journal entries while in isolation, but also on the contradictions of what is “hard” and “soft”, or “gentle” and “aggressive.: I am constantly at odds with my body, and despite all of the different treatments that I’ve gone through, it seems to be that the only thing to really bring me to peace with my own skin has been tattooing. I have been exploring that relationship over the past two years. Last year, I did my thesis on tattoos as relational art and a trauma-healing experience. By tying in memory recall/story-telling and the ritual of tattooing, I documented the stories of participants who dealt with the loss of body agency and produced a trauma-responsive tattoo practice oriented around reclaiming the body. Currently, I focus on those ways that one can reclaim or retell their own bodies through tattooing.

Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
In high school, I had a Professor at a summer program who would continue to say “NO RISK= NO REWARD,” and I still think about that all the time. All of those cliche sayings are true! For me, it’s about calculated risks and trusting my instinct. I’m an anxious person, no doubt, so I have had to learn to let go a little bit and Identify whether things are a “gut feeling” or a “fear.” Follow the gut, but not always the fear.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: http://sabdrescher.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stab.dee/

Image Credits:
Paris Helena

 

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