Sarah Elizabeth Cornejo
2022 State Fellow
Southern Prize Finalist
Recipient Information
Location
Memphis, Tennessee
Medium
Sculpture
Year of Award
2022
Grant or Fellowship
Southern Prize and State Fellowship
Grant Amount
$5,000
Artist Statement and Biography
Sarah Elizabeth Cornejo’s sculptural work utilizes the possibilities within hybridity to speak of a hypothetical place where humans have evolved into hybrid beings with animals, insects, and discarded human-made materials. The resulting physical evolution of this voluntary merging challenges social discomfort around bodies that are not easily categorized by blurring the boundaries between animal and human, living and dead, animate and inanimate. She uses Latin-American history, abject theory, and environmental distress to investigate notions of human exceptionalism, as well as humanity’s trajectory. Drawing upon her own experiences, her work investigates identities that straddle cultures and utilizes that hybrid state as an opportunity for reckoning. The resulting sculptural narrative aims to disrupt notions of human hierarchy, testing the phenomenon between humanity, mammality and technology in a chimeric future.
Biography
Sarah Elizabeth Cornejo is an interdisciplinary artist based in Memphis, TN. She is currently a co-founder and co-curator of BASEMENT, a provisional artist-run space in Chapel Hill, NC. Her work has been shown throughout the eastern United States and internationally including the Mint Museum, Ackland Art Museum, and Duke University among others. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her BA in Studio Art and English Literature from Davidson College. She was most recently a ten month resident at Crosstown Arts, a 2021 New Public Sculpture Fellow with the Urban Arts Commission in Memphis, and a 2021 recipient of TriStar Arts’ inaugural Current Art Fund project grant.
Warnings and Prophecies From Serpents and Seas
Year: 2021
Medium: Mixed Media
Size (h x w x d): 54“ x 35“ x 34“
Aluminum, foam, saw dust, wood glue, Tennessee and South Carolina soil, coquinashells, pig hairs, coral, shells, steel spikes, epoxy clay, acrylic paint.
In the mythologies of the world snakes are part of the fabric of the unknown beginning.They have been the evil, the punishment, the temptress, the feathered rattling deity, thechurners of prodigious oceans. Drawing upon Latin American myth and history, easternorigin stories, and the writings of Gloria Anzaldu ́a, “Warnings and Prophecies FromSerpents and Seas” investigates existing explanations for human existence, resistsdominant doctrines dictating moral gendered expectations, and serves as a propheticdeity of a divergent human future. This hairy, scaled embrace has a pearlescent humanhandprint, an inconsequential marker of cooperative tenderness.
Warnings and Prophecies From Serpents and Seas (detail)
Year: 2021
Medium: Mixed Media
Size (h x w x d): 54“ x 35“ x 34“
detail.
The Epoch of Loss
Year: 2021-2022
Medium: Mixed Media
Size (h x w x d): Modular pieces variable up to 720 square feet.
Settled within the United States’ current trajectory where climate degradation andviolent suppression of marginalized peoples are irrevocably intertwined and seeminglyceaseless, The Epoch of Loss reckons with the breaking point to which we are headedby offering a glimpse into a possible future on earth. This hypothetical landscape existsafter the climax of our current increasing pressure points and takes inspiration fromlandscapes created by giant earthworms in South America. Mounds of single-useplastics, clothing, bottles, plastic chairs, and other detritus have fossilized the lastepoch of toxic living in the Anthropocene. Broken car glass swept up from the streethas tenderly and virulently reiterated itself on found animal skulls, tin cans, and bolts;beer cans have reimagined themselves into fauna; an object on the wall of human hairfrom two sisters and rattlesnake tails signals warning... (continued)
The Epoch of Loss (detail)
Year: 2021-2022
Medium: Mixed Media
Size (h x w x d): Modulare pieces variable up to 720 square feet.
(continued) This futuristic landscape quietly determines its own space in the presentand allows for limited movement within it. In the aftermath of the human epoch, one thathas seen the greatest consumption and violent destruction of life on earth, thislandscape has begun a defensive and healing re-fertilization; slowly building upon itselfuntil human time has become part of it’s strata, rot, and remembered past.Materials: aluminum, sand, foam, burnt fallen limbs, aqua resin, broken car glass fromthe street, beer cans, bullet casings, car parts, old clothing, single use plastics, milkjugs, plastic wrappings, door handles, plumbing, cement, pipes, tires, found animalskulls, rocks.
Brood
Year: 2021
Medium: Mixed Media
Size (h x w x d): 12”x7”x5.5”
human hair from two sisters, two rattlesnake tails, epoxy clay, saw dust, wood glue,aluminum, acrylic paint, alcohol ink.
This sculptures utilizes hair from myself and my sister and two rattlesnake tails found atestate sale. Where I'm from in South Carolina, there are lots of Timber rattlesnakes,which are dangerous but not particularly aggressive. They always rattle when you getclose, and you therefore always have an opportunity to change course. I continue to befascinated by snakes and the history, mythology, and symbolism they are imbued with,but particularly by that possibility of the rattle. These sculptures I create serve as aglimpse into a hypothetical future but one that also exists alongside us in the present aswarning and a call to action.
The One Who Gives Meaning and Consequence
Year: 2019
Medium: Mixed Media
Size (h x w x d): 85” x 75” x 73”
Aluminum, plaster, tire tubes, steel, saw dust, wood glue, epoxy, caulk, airport gradereflective beads, acrylic paint, fabric.
Dismissing technological futures such as The Singularity - the belief in a mergerbetween human and machine intelligence and that our consciousness, will exist andregenerate as artificial intelligence - The One Who Gives Meaning and Consequenceexists as a diety of a future world that looks towards overlooked technologies such asroot systems, plant communication, fungi, insects, natural phenomena, and evenworms, which have no beginning or end. This sculpture has an undulating serpentine orworm-like body with a yonic opening where a head could be. It requires the viewer’sparticipation to activate by using flash on their phones to which the sculpture lights updefensively. However, the image that the viewer can take away can exist only in alimited and fraught virtual realm.
The One Who Gives Meaning and Consequence (detail)
Year: 2019
Medium: Mixed Media
Size (h x w x d): 85” x 75” x 73”
detail taken with flash.
Womb
Year: 2021
Medium: Mixed Media
Size (h x w x d): 13”x8”x8.5”
epoxy clay sculpted to look like fruiting body of phallus indusiatus mushroom (whichmay smell of rotting meat but some variations may also be a female aphrodisiac thatelicits spontaneous orgasms), scrap fencing cut down and lining the interior, saw dust,wood glue, acrylic paint, epoxy, ants.
With this sculpture I was thinking about the future, the violence of the present, and agrowing anxiety about where we are headed, and what world will exist for us. ThePhallus indusiatus mushroom is an androgenous phallic mushroom with skirt that has aslime surface that attracts ants and other insects. The physiological response to it'ssmell is uncontrollable and bodily, which contradicts the notion that humans can controleverything and humanity's constant desire to set ourselves exempt from nature’sconsequences. "Womb" is an androgenous, aphrodisiac, visceral, and viscose beingwith an incredibly hostile interior.
Kin/Kindred
Year: 2020
Medium: Mixed Media
Size (h x w x d): 50" x 29" x 19.5"
concrete, aluminum, saw dust, wood glue, coquina shells, pig hairs, foam, found deerskull, quartz crystal, alligator garfish scales, old nails from flipped houses, shells, coral,human hair, rocks, epoxy clay, acrylic paint, alcohol ink, sand, tarantula.This sculpture uses hairs along the spine and old nails around the front to keep viewerat a distance so it can observed, but on the sculpture’s terms. It seemingly exists in afar enough away future that it’s been able to be left alone with crystal crystal slowlyforming around it like the great caves such as Lechuguilla, which are altered realms outof our human-made environment. They have been allowed to build up silently, creatingphenomenal spaces outside of human touch. Humans can’t go in them withoutcompromising the space, so we have to contend with the fact that their existence isdirectly tied to our lack of interaction with them...(continued)
Kin/Kindred (detail)
Year: 2020
Medium: Mixed Media
Size (h x w x d): 50" x 29" x 19.5"
detail.
The inability to have or do something exceedingly frustrates humans. In the end, thesculpture symbolizes a slow coming together of beloved detritus to make a being that’smade up of mostly dead material that exists as a relic, a possibility, or a warning.