There is something primal about making pictures out of dirt, twigs, bark and found objects. It is perhaps our first experience of our own creativity, the first mark we leave on the world, our first attempt to shape the world around us. A child’s few scrabbled finger marks in the earth. Before there were cave paintings, primitive man’s first attempt to communicate with images was undoubtedly similarly a simple scribble in soil or sand. Impermanent and yet with far reaching consequences.
New York artist Sarah Rosado has returned to the earth, that most basic of material, our first canvas, to create images out of dirt, some primal, like the mask-like deer’s head, or the eagle, some incongruous such as the image of an elegant evening dress and high heels, the image completed with pearls and a ring, which recalls to us Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
In the images of some of the everyday objects she has created one can read both irony and celebration of the ordinary. Some pictures seem simply whimsical. Others have perhaps a little more bite. Is the image of the New York skyline and Liberty, in dirt, some kind of commentary? Sarah has said, “Viewers can decide what they really see and what it means to them individually. Who knows, they may find some “dirty” little secrets.”
You can find more of Sarah Rosado’s work here.
