Sara Scholl

I use art making to work through negative experiences that have happened to me throughout my life. It is a cathartic process where I form deep connections to my work.

A big part of my childhood was sweets. Being raised to be a sweet person, wanting sweets, being given sweets. I learned to be sweet to myself. Both of my grandmas would give my sister and I sweets. Every family celebration brought forth a plethora of various cookies and cakes and candies; and no birthday was complete without cake or cupcakes. Throughout my life I have developed a complicated relationship with food, and I love sweets.

For the majority of my adult life, my grandma Sally was my only remaining grandparent. When she passed away, I was left devastated by the loss. I thought about how her house had changed over my lifetime, from a vibrant green color to a vanilla cream hue. She taught me how to knit in this house, where she burned candles everyday, and she wrote to me each week while I was in school. After her passing I began to wonder to myself if the house was ever as green as it appeared in my memory.

My grandma Sally’s favorite color was green and I began surrounding myself with that color when she passed. In her memory I created a series of her house, one knitted from yarn, one cast bronze and aluminum, one wax, and one from paper. A yarn house for what I learned there, a metal house for how this memory will never breakdown, a wax house for those ever-present candles, and a paper house made of old shredded documents she had kept that I turned back into sheets of paper. I baked a green three-layer cake, a green bundt cake, cupcakes, a peanut butter cream pie, an apple pie, a pudding pie, chocolate chip cookies, double chocolate cookies, sugar cookies, thumbprint cookies, meringue cookies, pistachio pudding, green jello, and brownies. Everything green.

As we grow, we are shaped by the people in our lives, for better or worse. These negative events have led me to develop a personal mantra of “I’m insane, I’m scared, I’m broken.” I think about how these phrases will never leave me and brought the me in to physical existence using materials that will last for different amounts of time. I created tiles with these phrases in dark brown, light brown, and white wax as well as plaster, resin, iron, aluminum, and paper. Each material carried its own strength, integrity, and weight.

I use my art as a tool to work through the aspects of my self that I fear, hate, or that will impact me until I no longer exist. My mantra will never leave me, my relationship with food will hopefully only get better, and I will always miss my grandmother.