Sarah Nance

Sarah Nance is an interdisciplinary artist based in installation and fiber. She explores the entanglements of geologic processes and human experience in archived, constructed and speculative terrains. Her time spent living in the geologies of the Driftless Area, Oregon, Iceland and eastern Canada has been significant in the development of her research, much of which continues to be based in these regions.

Nance’s current project, shroud for an ancient sea, draws on a diverse terrain of subsurface meteor craters, fossilized coral reefs and exhumed mountain ranges. These “archived” landscapes are often observable only through fossil records, artifacts or recorded data. Still, they are inextricably layered within contemporary landscapes, creating entangled strata of geologic and human histories. The site-responsive works in shroud for an ancient sea vary from expansive textiles to experimental vocal performances, becoming surface layers that point to complex records of deep time within the geo-anthropic landscape.

Prior to teaching at SMU, Nance has held professorships at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec and Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA, both in fiber.