Artist Statement
Through a lineage that includes stop-motion animation and printmaking, my work explores the tension between movement and stillness, capturing time as both a fleeting sensation and a preserved moment. Each piece acts as a vessel of memory, recording a specific action or moment, a gesture, a plant, or a peculiar light. These dense and layered works are shaped by connection, grief, and change.
I often begin my work with animation, using image sequences, repetition, and symmetry as tools to explore movement. Recently, I have focused on silhouetted hands holding flower and plant cuttings. As the hands sway and rotate, the images layer into kaleidoscopic patterns, forming new and unexpected arrangements. These experiments carry over into my printmaking and kiln-fired glass work, where overlapping images encourage the viewer to imagine animations in the mind’s eye, bringing a sense of movement and life to otherwise still surfaces.
Exploring glass has deepened my interest in material processes. I use stenciled silkscreens to produce designs and sift powdered glass through them, gradually building images over multiple kiln firings, typically three to eight. Each firing adds complexity and reveals both precision and unpredictability, while chemical reactions create subtle variations. The final form is never exactly what I anticipate, but once cooled it is permanently fixed, fragile in appearance yet durable, like a moment of crystallized in time.
Botanical imagery appears throughout my work, often held in silhouettes. These forms come from my garden and from the garden of a close friend who passed away during the Northern California fires. Smoke from the fires produced a light that was both beautiful and unsettling, marking a moment where personal loss and environmental change became inseparable. I am drawn to the idea that beauty can emerge from loss; these paradoxes inspire my work, inviting me to find strength and hope even in moments of fragility.
About the Artist
Sarah Klein is a San Francisco-based visual artist. Informed by a decade of working in stop-motion animation, she expands on the language of movement within print-based glass works. Klein earned her MFA from Mills College in Oakland. Her work has been presented at the Exploratorium, Mill Valley Film Festival, Southern Exposure, and Telematic in the San Francisco Bay Area; Anthology Film Archives, and Transmitter Gallery in New York; Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Festival Tweetakt in Utrecht, and General Public in Berlin. She has been awarded residencies at Djerassi Resident Artist Program, M.H. de Young Museum, Jentel Artist Residency, and the Ucross Foundation. She has received awards from Kala Art Institute, Headlands Center for the Arts, Trust For Mutual Understanding, and Zellerbach Family Foundation. Most recently she worked in partnership with the Jim Campbell Studio to create a site- specific animation for the top of the Salesforce Tower. In 2008 she founded the screening program Stop & Go which showcases animations by visual artists and filmmakers. For over 20 years she has working in collaboration as the co-owner an illustrator of The Local Foods Wheel.