Sara Jones is an artist, designer and curator in the New York City area. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally. She is currently the Director of Design and Creative Strategy for Public Art Fund.

Statement

My work engages history through the reimagining of collective memory, family archives, and the psychic resonances embedded in public and private spaces. Long rooted in textiles, fabrics and thread, my practice currently foregrounds the metaphorical power of these materials to reference the way we talk about narratives and history: we “weave stories” and “connect the threads.” The formal repetition of the grid within my work is a literal reference to weaving (the warp and weft), yet it also metaphorically references a screen, or scrim: something that allows some things to flow through, but prevents others from entering or crossing the boundary. The literal and metaphoric grid signals both object and action, a physical screen and the process of screening: we screen calls, we choose what we want and don’t want to cross the border into our house, our country, our threshold, our consciousness. Beyond these specific allusions, my work investigates metaphor as a mode of movement with the potential to collapse distance and difference, revealing the ways that history itself is metaphoric by dislocating the viewer from the certain here of the present to the uncertain elsewhere of the past.