SARAH BERNSTEIN
In 2021, after my father was intubated due to COVID, I went through a profound reassessment of my decade-long journaling practice.
At the start of my father's six-month hospitalization, my family held onto medical updates very tightly. Variations in heart rate, breathing, and signs of infection felt like theatrical cues to celebrate or despair. As weeks went by, daily descriptive details became less urgent. As months went by, they became less desirable.
This desire for pattern recognition and overview—to somehow see chronological time simultaneously—transformed my writing. Instead of bullet points or narrative entries, I began creating visual chart systems populated by core images of my sensations, relationships, dreams, and challenges during a lunar cycle. Private journaling transformed into an exercise in mapping qualitative personal data. The work that emerged resembled a combination of medical chart, scrapbook, and esoteric diagram. I completed eight months of these visual-chart-journals during my father's hospitalization and recovery.
During this same period, I quilted an existing set of medical scrubs. Both works—the visual journals and the quilted scrubs—examine how meaning and care are developed in response to clinical aesthetics and priorities.
NORM/WELL
Norm/Well is a series of paper collages I created between 2015 and 2019.
I repeatedly re-contextualized characters from Norman Rockwell's illustrations, placing them in Ikea interiors, how-to-paint landscapes, and vintage posters issued by the Department of Agriculture. These collages employ a fundamental principle of physical theater: narrative is created from a perceived relationship between a character's physically held tension or visible desire and their environment.
Decontextualized from their origins, these figures persist in generating compelling, humorous, tragic, and sentimental narratives. Simultaneously, they echo the common theatrical dilemma of translating beloved or era-bound characters into contemporary storytelling.
