SARAH BERNSTEIN

 Terrible Miracles 

Terrible Miracles  deconstructs and reimagines imagery take from historical accounts of the Rocky Mountain Locust swarms that swept across North America in the late 1800s. While researching these swarms I was moved by how closely these texts resembled the tone, imagery, and style of American folktales. This strange feeling of slippage, between history and allegory, became the driving force for this body of work and the textiles, sculpture, poetry, and multimedia installations present within it.

I am constantly fascinated by the way shared experiences of the natural and social world move towards a state of folklore. The desire (both personal and collective) to revise and reenact extraordinary events is attribute of humanity that seems inherent, ancient, and deeply contemporary. I have come to think of this drive as a type of "folkloric instinct" we all possess. In this work I use a material vocabulary that is both digital and analogue to explore a remarkable sense of anachronism that accompanies contemporary participation in lineages of storytelling, craft, and cyclical experiences of the natural world.

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