PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Fates is a response to the COVID- 19 pandemic, where I found that I lost my sense of play and experimentation in my work and had an acute desire to create work which could exist outside and interact with nature.

This series is part of my work which addresses political and cultural happenings in the United States of America. The stories and myths of a culture convey a sense of place and a sense of the people who inhabit that place. In this way, visual art that interacts with a story enters a narrative sphere where it must encounter the local.

This work was created during my online virtual residency with Belgrade Art Studio.

Sarah Nguyen is a multimedia artist, working primarily with paper. Storytelling is central to her hand cut-fiber panels and paintings. The intricate compositions found in her work are mostly landscape based and feature symbolic motifs—flora, fauna, and an ever-changing moon—to elicit childhood memories of myths, fables, and folklore. Nguyen uses a balance of abstract and representational forms in order to sever the connection between shape and meaning, connecting the viewer instead to the gesture of the brush or cut of the knife, so that s/he becomes complicit in the art. Myths, reverence and refinement of nature, and observance of daily life, are the concepts behind her work.

Nguyen’s work has appeared in numerous national and international solo and group exhibitions and publications. Her work has been part of nationally recognized exhibitions in museums and festivals.
She received her BFA in Illustration from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA in Painting from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.