Portfolio by Sadie Mason

I am from North Carolina. We spent many years in Tuckaseegee, a rural part of the mountains. One of the first things you’d notice about Tuckaseegee is how empty it feels. Old churches sit on top of steep hills looking down on you as their shingles deteriorate. Big patches of land hold run-down houses and dogs with exposed rib cages chained to fences. Right next to a sign reading, “Private Property, Will Shoot Trespassers.” Any of the youth move away, leaving their parents and grandparents who slip behind screen doors as time falls over their faces. What was once living becomes a lingering fog.

Coming to a new part of the country for school, I realized that one’s relationship to their hometown is forever. You see the world through the environment you spent your formative years, your vision becoming a stained window. No matter where you are, you will carry this place forever. My work is an exploration of attachment to and consumption of place, more specifically that of rural North Carolina and the ideals that come with it. I work in mixed media between oil paint and fibers. I use fabric because of its historically feminine significance. Painting gives me the ability to craft symbolic imagery, to tell a story to the viewer that quietly explores pungent themes. Combining the two is my take on a subtle protest to the way historically female ways of artmaking are treated as less serious. Many women in the South would use quilted imagery to communicate things they wouldn’t otherwise be able to say. I aim to replicate that practice in my own way, both through choice of medium and painted imagery. 

The iconographic imagery you see is taken from Southern culture. Magnolia flowers represent the constructed vision of Southern femininity, both as an individual and in relation to men. Chickens are a stand in for the ‘traditional female role’, caged and intended for reproduction. Born with a set fate, slowly moving towards it. I work with curtains as they create the implication of in front and behind. Moreso, cause and effect.You pull the curtain back to painting that is a result of the experience lived. The reality you live is a result of the way you have been grown.

Sadie Mason is a mixed media artist from Charlotte, North Carolina and is currently a senior at Interlochen Arts Academy. She has been published in three issues of the Red Wheelbarrow, and received a faculty recognition award at the Interlochen Juried Student Exhibition. Her work is drawn from her experience growing up in the South, a place that holds a very nuanced grip on her arm. She will be continuing her studio art studies at New York University next year.