Ancestor Worship: Sarah Sense’s Woven Photographs by Donald Kuspit

Brooklyn Alligator, 40 x 60

By DONALD KUSPIT December 4, 2024

Sarah Sense’s woven photographs are unprecedented in the history of photography.  The usual photograph is machine-made and flat; Sense’s photographs are hand-made and curved—three dimensional rather than two dimensional, sculptural rather than pictorial.  They are three-dimensional objects not simply two-dimensional images.  The usual photograph is a memento mori, the image of some person doomed to disappear into oblivion; Sense’s photographs are pure abstractions, a kind of pattern painting, sometimes with an image sketchily embedded in the pattern, as in An Indian Hunting and Charles, both 2022, or a text, as in Plan of Attack and Queens Most Excellent Majesty, both 2022.  They are fragments of familiar meaning in an otherwise nonobjective formally unusual work.  In Worcester Bear, 2024 the strands of thread surge across the surface like abstract expressionist gestures, as though to announce the abstractness of the work, implying that it is a painting and sculpture in one.  Whatever images appear on the surface of Sense’s sculptural photographs seem beside the point of their abstract beauty, not to say aesthetic subtlety, however much the images allude to her native American heritage—but not as explicitly as their allusion to the form of the basket, and the method of its making, for her works are all homages to the innate creativity of her native American female ancestors, more pointedly her identification with them, her determination to remind us of their creativity, evident in their weaving, woman’s traditional craft. 

Montclair Perch Study

Sense’s maternal grandmother is Choctaw from Oklahoma; she learned to love and make baskets from her.  Sense’s I Want To Hold You Longer, 2024—a tour de force fusing grand gestures—the weavings that erupt from and explode beyond the rectangular work—conveys Sense’s wish to embrace her, establish rapport with her, or at least to hold on to her memory.  Travelling to the Montclair Museum of Art in New Jersey, the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, and the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts to see their collections of Native American baskets, Sense held—probably embraced and caressed—various baskets.  “The hands that wove the basket seem to be touching mine.  I hold it longer and feel the words “I want to hold you longer.”  Sense had a mystical experience of communion and union with her female ancestors through the medium of the baskets they made, a museum being an “aesthetic church,” as the philosopher Karsten Harries said, where “religious reverence and respect” hold sway.  Communing with—worshipping her female ancestors’ traditional baskets—and by way of that announcing that they were her muses not to say forgotten, long-suffering saints—she was able to Remember, 2024 them and reconnect with her Roots, 2024, that is, root her art in theirs, with that honoring and memorializing them.  

Brook;lyn Blackbird, 40 x 60

A photograph is a memory, perhaps a memory manque, for it is an illusion, and as such a deception, and it is consciously made rather than unconsciously created like a dream, but Sense’s photographs are emblems of authenticity, their patterns Power Lines, 2024, that is, they empower her.  Sense’s engagement with the baskets—traditional art—of her female ancestors confirms the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s view that “one cannot be creative except on the basis of tradition.”  “The basket is also a symbol of the womb.  When it holds fruit or wool it symbolizes woman’s fertility.”  Hence the basket became a symbol of the fertility symbolized by Sense’s nature, the mother of us all, evident in Hinushi and Remember, both 2024.  Both picture ancestral lands, the wide open space of nature native Americans inhabited before they were dispossessed by settlers and nature exploited and sullied.  It is worth emphasizing that Sense’s baskets show “the welcome complementation of the abstract by means of the objective and vice versa” that Kandinsky came to regard as the goal of the most emotionally and cognitively convincing art.(1)  And it is worth noting that the goddess Athena, “she who inspires wisdom,” was an expert weaver, and that weaving was associated with wise industriousness, which is surely evident in Sense’s ingenious photogenic baskets, a testimony to native American and her own individual genius and originality. WM

Note

(1)Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, eds. Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art (New York:  Da Capo Press), 242.