Sarah Edmands Martin
DESIGNERAssociate Professor
University of Notre Dame
Sarah Edmands Martin
DESIGNERAssociate Professor
University of Notre Dame
Work
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Shadows
Resin sculpture, installation, stop motion animation2022Concept
This collection of resin casts, stop-motion animations, and projection-mapped installations interrogate the juxtaposition of three moments of women’s oppressions in the US that span 332 years: 17th-century prosecutions during the Salem witch trials, 19th-century creative struggles by Midwestern women artists, and 21st-century challenges after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Juxtaposing these three moments in American history reveals the contingency, and therefore the transformability, of women’s subjugation.Despite this reanimation of largely forgotten history, the piece offers only a shadow of her form in order to acknowledge that all we have are traces of the past.
Bringing these stories and tensions to life, I animate the journal fragments describing her creative ambitions, which ultimately were subsumed by limitations set by patriarchy, motherhood, and domesticity. For example, one stop-motion component dissolves archival calligraphic journal entries into the frenetic silhouette of a 19th-century woman pacing inside her home. These moments in the stop-motion highlight fragments from the archive, such as when Maggie wrote, in 1881: “I feel at times like I would like to fly away,” and “If I had half the chances…” The animation then mutates the text and the woman’s figure into a bird in flight, thereby capturing a potential desire, a line of flight, that exceeds the actuality of history captured in the archive.
My cut paper profile portraits invite a viewer to reflect on the interplay between absence and presence. The silhouette becomes a medium for abstraction and reflection. We will never see these women clearly—only at a distance and without full detail—yet this piece animates and connects the concerns of mothers in the 19th century to transhistorical women’s issues.
This artistic intervention seeks to “jeopardize the status of the event” (in the words of Saidiya Hartman) but across multiple contexts, displacing the archive’s authorized account in favor of imagining what might have been. Further following Hartman, I do not substitute a story in place of narratives missing from the archive, employing what she calls “narrative restraint” that refuses to “provide closure.”
The traditional silhouette portraits, housed in the museum's permanent collection, were created using a pre-photographic drawing device called a physiognotrace. In my work, I reference the physiognotrace’s process of producing multiple shadow copies, simultaneously.
“…elaborates, augments, transposes, and breaks open archival documents so they might” speak about “what might have been” and amplify “moments of withholding, escape and possibility, moments when the vision and dreams of the wayward seemed possible.”
I designed a vertical and modular apparatus for stop motion animation that allows me to layer in analog materials, like cut paper puppets and natural flora and fibers, with a rack focus to shift and blur the attention quickly between subjects.
I choreograph frame by frame movement across layers of glass. The base of the structure is a lightbox which allows me to fully control the light source, and at the top is a wide aperture lens which affords me a dynamic vantage point from which to stage and animate.
To explain why this technique matters, I find the located-ness of speculation’s etymology helpful here. Built into the Latin is “to look” or to “observe from a vantage” which gives us not only the idea of looking, but looking from a particular perspective. In Shadows, I proliferate the viewing—the perspective—into 3 different perspectives (17th, 19th, 21st centuries)—not to fill in the blanks, but to invent an otherwise through juxtaposition.
The style of the stop motion is also intentionally erratic. I wanted to complicate smoothness by introducing friction and imperfect motion. These figures might feel more like marionettes or dolls or cutouts than actual three-dimensional human beings. Here, I’m also thinking about the way that dolls, figurines, and dollhouses in the 19th century were used as ideological play tools for women to learn domesticity.
While the 19th century was my starting point, I allowed this archive to move me both backwards and forward to other parallel moments of women’s oppression. The work engages records of 17th-century prosecutions during the Salem witch trials—from debates about mold infestations that arguably infected wheat stores, to mythologies around familiars and women’s medicinal knowledge. It also moves forward to ongoing 21st-century challenges in predominantly red states after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
The work operates as a multimedia palimpsest that juxtaposes and layers these historical echoes. For example, layered into the cast sculptural works are: cast resin epoxy, frontispiece tissue, cut paper silhouettes, found green bottle fly, found common house spider, found black house fly, ergot (the mold that infected wheat stores in the 17th century and which many historians believe led to the Salem witch trials) and Indiana Senate Bill #1 which is the bill restricting abortion access in Indiana after Roe v. Wade was overturned.