An Interview with Sarah Best
Aimee Resnick (she/her) - February 27, 2023
Sarah Best is an artist based in New York exploring themes of gender, death, fragility, and vulnerability. Her work is highly emotive: depicting the body in diverse, fragmented formations, she questions the human condition. Recipient of the Stacey Sussman Cavrell Traveling Fellowship and the Silas H. Rhodes Scholarship Award, Best is a renowned artist known best for her complexity of thought. This week, we sat down to discuss womanhood, paper-quilling, and the female form.
NAR: You’ve stated in previous interviews that “information drives behavior” with respect to the prevalence of modern media. What behaviors do you feel are impacted by media conglomerates?
Best: Media has this nefarious way of planting ideas in such a way that you believe they're your own, right? It affects your behavior, how you perceive the world, and the resulting choices you make.
And it affects women in a major way. Social media has truly influenced where value is placed for women. It's not just social media, though. Throughout the whole echelon of history, women's value has been placed solely on their looks.
It's like, are you good-looking? Do you fit this mold? What’s your body type? Buy these beauty products. It's all very superficial, and it tells women that our place is to look pretty and to constantly be buying these products to achieve an unattainable image.
NAR: Much of your work features disembodied parts of the female form. What is the inspiration behind these pieces?
Best: Those pieces were born out of that frustration that I was just talking about: feeling disembodied. In the piece Pull Yourself Together, it’s tongue in cheek, as there's nothing to pull together. We’re all just floundering around, trying to find our identity as a female. A lot of that work was very personal as I tried to figure out my struggles and just felt very dissociated and disjointed from everything.
NAR: Do you feel it is empowering or limiting for women to be separated from their bodies? Why?
Best: So much has been put on our bodies. It's kind of ridiculous. I feel like men don’t have to carry that. For example, in order for a woman to be respected, you have to suppress your sexuality, suppress your femininity. Anything that you do is perceived as aggressive
I don't know if it’s empowering as much as necessary for survival. It's more of a feeling than anything else. I think it's kind of sad.
NAR: What do you feel sparks our deep disgust with our own bodies? How does this relate to feminist notions of the body?
Best: It wasn't necessarily my intention to disgust. It was certainly something that I was up against. It's almost like a prop leg: it's a show, but the things that women go through daily and the damage they create in the psyche is real.
If you want to talk about self-loathing, it's grotesque. These are hard things to address. These are ugly things and the work reflects that. It's not about your curated self. It's about your internal world.
And it's painful and it's ugly and it's real. It's not airbrushed. It's not photoshopped. I felt the need to go that route: I felt like it needed to be jarring. I was screaming inside, and I needed my work to be loud and violent because that's what I was experiencing.
I think my experience as a female is akin to most other females’ experiences. Aside from the uniqueness of intersectionality of identity.
Women are always told to tone it down, to be quiet. The days of being meek and polite are over. This work is really aggressive. If you feel uncomfortable, then my mission was accomplished.
NAR: How does death relate to feminist practice?
Best: I don't know if it relates to my feminist practice as much as my human practice. I try to explore the human condition. We've put death at a distance.
Death is something I'm trying to come to terms with. It’s a natural state of human evolution. But what does that even mean? Where do we stand spiritually outside of our meat casings? I’m overcoming my own fears and embracing death.
I think humanity once had a healthy relationship with death that we lost. I guess I'm trying to find out what that healthy relationship was.
I have an idea of what it doesn't look like: sloughing our parents off in the way we treat elderly people today. We just push them to the side. Aging and death are items we don’t even want to think about in our culture.
As I'm getting older, I’ve started to think about these things, and it’s just like, oh my god. I'm in my forties and I'm just supposed to turn to dust soon and blow away, you know?
I guess I'm trying to grapple with death through art. It's an exploration to rediscover and reconnect. What did we lose? Why do we place so much value on superficial things?
NAR: Let’s swivel to your mixed media collages. How did you begin quilling? How does paper’s fragility relate to your artistic canon?
Best: My quilling started with my work in collage. I've always used collage, but, for a bit, I was painting and sculpting a lot. Long story short, I scraped my paintings and focused on collage, which brought me to paper.
One of the reasons I started to work with collage and paper is the fragility they hold. It's ephemeral, in a way. It has a life to it. If I can infuse it with some spirit.
Lately, I've been working very cleanly with it. It contradicts my sculptural works, which were very aggressive and almost violent, for lack of a better word. You can kind of achieve violence with paper, too. You can rip it, you can crumple it, you can convey all sorts of feelings by action. It just was a medium that made sense to me.
NAR: In your shadow boxes, you feature beautifully-sculpted paper animals alongside human Memento Mori. What is the metaphor behind these animals?
Best: I like to represent metamorphosis. Cyclical thing: I use snakes, with their shedding of the skin. It’s a rebirth. Right now I'm using the Nautilus shell. It represents the timeless perfection of nature. I use animals that demonstrate time immemorial: this cyclical thing we're a part of and will always continue to be a part of.
NAR: Do you have anything else you would like to share with our readership?
Best: Just to maintain perseverance. Listen to yourself. Always stay true to you. Don't lose your own voice. There’s always going to be other people telling you what to do. Just listen to yourself.
Please note: this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
