Sara Nesbitt
In my work, both the large scale drawings, and the mixed media “Mandalas”, I tell a history of places and scenes, influenced by the present, and tinged with the past. Figures and animals, representing our most basic feelings and metaphors, run, dance, and chase each other through the landscape with the ever present architecture of buildings, representing reason and the heartbeat of the urban world. My work tells a story, a history of a place, half imagined, half experienced, always influenced by the cities I’ve lived in, such as New York, London and Rome, where my father studied Architecture, which is the heartbeat of our urban world.
Using pen and ink, and mixed media, my work creates scenes of unsettled idylls. Ambiguous space and the interactions between figures and animals explore important themes of our time such as: the ideal of the rational versus the accepted order, ”Natural Man versus the Civilized World, democracy versus inherited status, and individualism versus the collective good. Using referential historical figures from the 17th c., a time when the Western World and our country, where discovering new ideas, philosophies and lands, the unintentional ambiguity these figures shows an apt reflection of our own time.