SARAH BERNSTEIN

 Terrible Miracles 

Terrible Miracles deconstructs and reimagines eye witness accounts of the Rocky Mountain Locust plagues. These locusts, whose swarming devastated areas of North America in the late 1800s, had a lasting legacy on the cultural, economic, and agricultural policies of the United States. As I was researching this phenomenon, I was struck by how closely these first-person texts resembled the style and sentiments of American folktales. A strange feeling of slippage, between history and allegory, became the driving force for the textiles, sculpture, poetry, and intermedia installations woven together in this body of work.

​

I am fascinated by the mythos of catastrophe and its role within folklore. The personal and collective desire to touch, revise, and reenact extraordinary events is as ancient as it is contemporary. I have come to think of this desire, so inherent to human nature, as type of liturgical impulse or folkloric instinct. This work employs a material vocabulary, both digital and analogue, to examine this impulse to blend the extraordinary historical into the creative contemporary. It speaks to a magical and disruptive sense of anachronism, a trait often found within contemporary allegiance to historical lineages of storytelling, craft, and depictions of the natural world.