Sarahann Walker is creating an engaging context for how we encounter "nests," or what we think of "nesting." Our interest has been piqued!

We at Small Space Fest are excited to experience her art installation!

Artist Statement

My work, in the simplest sense, is a recreation of natural nesting habits from different humanoid and animal species. I began researching ethology books on the behaviors of different species, primarily focusing on birds, and then selecting specific photographs from the books, usually being a birds nesting ground or actual nest. I would paint the image and recreate an attached installation that inhabited familiar structure or space. Psychologically, I would place myself in the behavior of the bird that I was researching and try to mentally gain experiences from the physical construction, adapting to each technique of nesting.

Just like human beings, each individual animal experiences life differently but we share mutual instincts such as reproduction, death and the time in between. As people, what are we meant to do during that time? Aside from simply reproduction and survival, what is our primary goal as humans? The typical nest I was taught to understand as a child was to attend school, receive a degree, chase a career, meet a man, get married, have kiddos, and, well, grow old and depart.

Therefore, my nest appeared actually as a cage. The idea is to create a nest, a world of protection, the act of giving a home a meaning and spiritual growth, that test of life and the origin of our own identities. The world is a nest but also a cage that limits us from the human experience. As an artist, I wanted to occasionally capture all of my human experiences and create reliquaries of my past and present.

Later, I began to focus on the relationship I would build with my pieces and how it engaged my own personal environment or "nest." I gradually began exploring the concept of creating installations that preserved pieces of me or pieces that nurture parts of my life. Such as structures that inhabited specific memories, personal relationships and sentimental objects. This concept has now opened up various ideas for me to reflect on how the artwork is being encountered by an audience and how my unique residences are seen as a reflection of their own homes. I want to create a universal space that is vulnerable, welcoming and protected, almost in a sense a living art that breathes and conveys itself as a conscious thing and inhabits common instincts of shelter, safety and yet is still its own home.

I work in various mediums that I feel help explore the ideas of construction, reproduction cycles and origins of identity, cycles of habit, and the psychological developments of space. Most of my installations are recycled objects that are held together by the unity of each material. I predominantly use materials or objects that interplay masculine and feminine qualities, allowing them to intertwine I create a voyeuristic space for the viewer, one desirable, questionable and alarming. I also construct a heat or light source to emphasize the artworks desire to stay alive. The obsessiveness, superimposed structures mimic the nesting habits that we unconsciously form within ourselves.