Everything with Wings
by Sarah Walko
Everything with Wings. 2020. Mixed media shadow box sculpture with paintings in Petri dishes, cloth butterflies, rhinestones, glass.
I’m interested in creating a mythological language at the intersection of nature and culture that decenters humans and includes what author Sophie Strand refers to as "the animate everything." By making and arranging text and objects into sculptures, installations, and films, I create environments in which ephemera from the natural world meet antiquities of a mystical science or artifacts from a culture to tell stories. By rooting the work in objects that carry stories from the earth and widening the inquiry into mystical science, I am beckoning a sense of wonder, curiosity, mystery, and awe and striving to do so in a way that the viewer feels included in the narrative, not outside of it.
Love Letters. 2021. Mixed media with 100 year old letter envelope, metallic butterfly, paper flowers, twigs, stones, beads, graphite.
My work aims to create a mythology that allows perceptions to shift from the historical to the narrative, the scientific, the personal, and the magical.
Myths are not mere stories; they are active, adaptive insights into the world and our relationship within it ,and act as an evolving compass and a mirror. My work aims to create a mythology that allows perceptions to shift from the historical to the narrative, the scientific, the personal, and the magical. The series Everything With Wings began years ago in thinking about the symbolism of the cocoon of the butterfly as the primordial place of transformation and then the emergence of rebirth. I'm very influenced by literature and genres like climate fiction and the role of the imagination in the ecological challenges we are facing now and on the road ahead. The butterfly holds this symbol of hope and what can emerge from the darkness. Within the context of my installations, this symbol harkens the Rebecca Solnit quote, "People have always been good at imagining the end of the world which is much easier than imagining the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end."
Land to Land. 2021. Mixed media sculpture with gilded hornet's nest, stones, beads, metallic butterflies, lightbulbs, crystals on slate.
Sarah Walko is an artist, author and curator who has directed non-for profit organizations and executed independent curatorial projects for over 15 years. She is currently the Director of Education and Community Engagement at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey. Her art has been shown in exhibitions around the country and she has been a visiting artist and artist in residency for numerous programs in addition to serving as a mentor in the NYFA Immigrant Artists mentorship program.
