Sarah Darlene: When the Cloud Becomes the Rain II

 Hi, I am Sarah Darlene. I am a painter and a fiber artist, and my work explores abstraction and embodiment and creative ritual as a path for healing. The piece you're looking at is called When the Cloud Becomes the Rain. Earlier this year it was on view at the Denver Art Museum, where this next clip you're about to hear was recorded.

The day before this recording was made, I met Cooper, the other person I'm talking with here. We met a sauna of all places and struck up a conversation and quickly realized we shared a connection through abstraction. I create abstract work, but his late father was also an abstract painter. Cooper had recently begun unpacking his dad's artwork after his passing and was making a podcast about that experience.

The very next day we met at the museum, stood in front of this piece and recorded a conversation about it. What you're about to hear is an excerpt from that moment:

Cooper: How, how does it feel to you to receive your own piece? Probably for the many of time you've looked at it, you know it's...     Like, does this still do anything to you?

Sarah: Yeah, it totally does. I can look at those things that were meaningful to me and like remember, it is about remembering in a lot of ways. Like I can remember the wedding that I was at. I can remember like this one piece in the corner, it looks like muscles. Like that was my sister's Halloween costume. It was like leggings that have like a, you know, paintings of muscles on it.

The stripe piece that's next to that, my mother-in-law gave me this jumpsuit and I cut it up after we split and I do still get feelings from it when I sit with it and remember it. And, you know, I've been teaching my flow state class here for four years now, and part of that class is we go out into the galleries and we meditate with one artwork for three minutes, and then we talk about it and I've never had work up in the museum before, so I actually was able to take my class here last week and do that practice with them, with my own work, which is super powerful. And you know, that was week three in our four week class and so we've practiced meditation, we practice painting together.

They understand my practice in an embodied way, and like several of them cried, you know, and it's like, you don't have to know. I didn't tell them all the meanings of these things, I just told them that some of these things are things that I've worn. I don't have to give that narrative, but I think when you talk about shedding parts of yourself and like integrating those things into, now that people feel something from that, and it's also like these, these clothing pieces are abstract shapes. Some of the edges are pretty cut and kind of violently done so, and like ripped apart.

Cooper: That's what I was gonna, just looking at it, I think I'm really challenging myself to try to take something from it more than I usually do. Yeah, because you said something yesterday and for context, we met yesterday in a sauna and it felt very like coincidental and fortuitous because I had this experience over the weekend of trying to unpack art of my dad's and of, of people he worked with and to meet an abstract. Artists so quickly felt important, and I came back wanting to challenge myself. To understand it and I don't quite know how to do that.  Something you just said and something you said yesterday of having two and a half minutes or having some amount of time in front of a work and just seeing what happens feels like an actionable way to change that.

Sarah: Well, part of it too is, you know, and again, something I said yesterday was like the average person spends seven seconds in front of an artwork at a gallery. So to set a timer and spend three minutes in silence with a group of other people in front of an artwork is a really long time, and what ultimately happens, especially when you're in a group, is you get a little self-conscious in the silence. Like you don't know what to do with it. And when you're not talking about it, you have to sit and tap into what happens in your body when you're looking at it. So like when an anxiety comes up or like something that I talk about in my class is like, you know, our body speaks to us.

It doesn't always have to be our mind. Like when you have a gut feeling or a knot in your throat, like those are literal physical things that you feel in your body. So part of that three minutes of like sitting with it is like, where do I feel that in my body? And like, what does that mean? Like feeling a knot in your throat is obviously like crying, but that's also, you know, your throat chakra.

Something needs to be said or something needs to be heard. When you feel a gut feeling, when you have a gut feeling about something, that's your intuition. That's like guiding you somewhere. So a lot of what I try and teach people in looking at abstract painting is like, like we talked about yesterday, there's no narrative here.

You can kind of come up with a narrative because there is clouds and there are some recognizable things. And like if you look close enough, you can tell that it's clothing and fabric and like, if we go closer, you can see the stitches, which like the stitches also kind of references this like idea of healing the body. So you can come up with these different narratives in your head just by looking at it, but it's tapping into your body and then also seeing like where does your brain take you? 

End Interview: We stayed at the museum talking until they kicked us out that night, and even then we kept going, sitting on the benches outside after the doors closed. You can follow me on Instagram to stay updated on when the full podcast will be released, but I hope this little glimpse of our conversation gives you a sense of how I approach my work.

It's deeply personal and intimate because as you now know, some of these fabrics have lived my life with me. Through both hard seasons and through the sweetest ones. I mentioned that a lot of my work is about remembering, but I think the most important thing to remember and the message with this work is that everything is temporary.

Every moment is fleeting, nothing is permanent, and change is the only constant. Thanks for taking the time to listen, and I really hope you enjoy the rest of the show.