Though Sarah Lawson lives far from the coast in Nelson County, they have been keeping tabs on the climate crisis for some time now, following it internationally in the news, and even mapping the movement of a particular iceberg in Antarctica. At home, Lawson (a contributor to C-VILLE) has been monitoring the changes occurring in the creek that runs through their property. The land belonged to Lawson’s grandparents, so they’ve known this stream all their life and remember how it was and how it’s changed.
Lawson’s show at New City Arts, “Salience, the sea,” addresses two different themes associated with the climate crisis. Mortality salience, meaning the knowledge that we’re all going to die, and also, the sea, or oceans and bodies of water generally—the flashpoints where the effects of the climate crisis are most apparent.
Lawson acknowledges the intrinsic sadness of the subject matter. “There’s a lot of unprocessed death and grieving I think we’re feeling as a society in response to COVID,” Lawson says. “I’m currently studying social work at VCU. A lot of studies about mortality salience talk about how, ‘Yes, it’s horrible, we’re all going to die. How could there possibly be a silver lining?’ The silver lining, from a clinical standpoint, is that if you acknowledge this existential fact and embrace it, you can use that to really make the most of the time you have.”
The larger works in the show are intended as a devotional on grieving, for what has been lost and what is to come. The smaller works started as part of a daily collage practice Lawson undertook when they turned 38 last February as a way of confronting their own mortality and staying in the moment. They titled this body of work using a numerical system: The first number is the chronological order in which the piece was done, followed by days in the year, followed by Lawson’s age. Lawson typically did these at the end of the day, while processing what news they’d read, the work they’d done and other quotidian occurrences. Gathering together the accordion files where they kept clippings, sorted by color, pattern, and texture, they went through them to see what jumped out. Beginning with “a very loose gaze,” Lawson would sort through, creating a smaller stack of things they wanted to incorporate. “I allow my subconscious to move things around in a certain way, trying to be as light-handed as possible in determining what’s going to come,” Lawson says.
Collage appeals to Lawson because it’s finding meaning in something discarded. It’s also open access—anyone can collage. “Something as simple as scissors and a glue stick can really affect someone’s day, or how they view the world. I just love that. It’s a really simple, easy to access form of self-expression.”
In some works, Lawson highlights the imagery represented in various scraps of paper, with others they subvert what’s being depicted, pairing it with pieces of colored paper to produce more abstract studies (“23/365/38,” “20/365/38,” “108/365/38” (a self-portrait), “70/365/38”). With both approaches, the inspired arrangements are striking.
Lawson will often use the same picture twice to create a mirror image. Sometimes, this is exact, as in “6/365/38,” where the heads of two fantastical beasts form a portal from which a hand extends. In other works, like “29/365/38” and “54/365/38,” they alter them slightly, retaining the original shapes and outline.
When they incorporate the human form, Lawson does so with a big helping of witty surrealism. In “22/365/38,” a colossal Audubon-like bird is picking up, or dropping, cartoon figures from or into an Italian town. In “123/365/38,” a woman’s head and hand emerge from a fat tubular offshoot of a heart, framed by a spray of mushrooms. “59/365/38” presents two fastidiously turned-out 18th-century soldiers sitting primly astride a large airborne fish. The two disembodied eyes in “31/365/38” grab the viewer’s attention, as they seem adrift on a sea of matter that could be cellular, geologic, or elemental.
It’s hard to pick a favorite from Lawson’s visual bounty, but there’s something so captivating about “89/365/38”—the modern building placed in the midst of a woodland setting. Lawson cut out a circle in the center, creating a void in the midst of the sleek corporate exterior. It also has the effect of a giant mirrored disc reflecting the surrounding landscape, and creates the impression of space vacillating from foreground to background.
Considering one’s own death and the collapse of the natural world is pretty bleak stuff. But the richness of Lawson’s work, which does just that, suggests it doesn’t have to be. If we can be clear-eyed about the realities of our future, we can thrive even if that future is grim. “The overall macro level problems that we’re facing from an ecosystem standpoint are horrific, but if we ignore them it just makes it worse,” says Lawson. “Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of darkness, but I try to practice being more comfortable within that and using it as an impetus to imagine alternatives.”