Sarah S. Curley
Sarah S. Curley grew up in the Midwest, but eventually settled in Arizona where she has lived for over thirty years. Although her first love was photography, over the years she has taken a number of seminars in acrylic painting, water color, and colored pencil. Her work has evolved from landscape photographs to creating images using the alternative photographic process of cyanotype, using paper or silk as her canvas. The images may later be enhanced with water color, pastels, and/or colored pencil. For the past decade, she has been exploring the dramatic use of light in the creation of abstract images in a variety of media.
Her work has been exhibited in a number of local, regional, and international juried shows. She is a juried member (alternative photography) of the Sonoran Arts League, Cave Creek, AZ; a charter member of the Arizona Photography Alliance; and a member of Art Intersection Gallery, Gilbert, Arizona, and Medium Photo, San Diego, CA.
She is currently an exhibiting artist at The Finer Arts Gallery, 6137 E. Cave Creek Road, Cave Creek, AZ
Artist’s Statement
The experience of moving beyond grief or loss to renewal has been at the core of my work for many years. I have created compositions in a variety of media to help me acknowledge, explore, and, finally, accept the emotions involved with grief and move beyond them.
Honoring, yet updating, the cyanotype process invented in the 1800’s, I initially created images on silk fabric by folding the silk, using found objects or digital negatives, or a variety of other techniques. In some cultures, white is the symbol of death. As I created the images, I began to focus on the color white as being a metaphor for the death of a loved one. However, the color blue became my unifying element, representing the sorrow and pain that one feels when grieving, yet also expressing the eventual joy or hope that one feels after the passage of time. The images are now a part of my completed project Grief to Renewal: A Trilogy.
Presently I am creating a number of abstract studies in cyanotype-on-paper, collage, and mixed media that explore the land of fantasy and surrealism.