ARTIST STATEMENT
Sawyer Rose is a sculpture, installation, and social practice artist. She currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Throughout her career, Sawyer has used her artwork to shine a spotlight on contemporary social and ecological issues. Her metalwork sculptures explore the ways living things adapt to changing environments and her work on The Carrying Stones Project addresses issues of women’s work inequity.
In regard to her metalwork Sawyer notes, “The sculptural forms of my metalworks are clad in layers of silver solder and copper, as if their delicate bodies are growing the armor they need to flourish in the environment humans are leaving for them. Using the texture of the metal as my primary mark-making medium, the liquefied silver morphs into bark, or feathers, or scales.”
The Carrying Stones Project is an ongoing series of sculpture, data visualization, and social practice works that explores women’s work inequity in its many forms.
Cooking, cleaning, childcare and eldercare responsibilities often still default to women, keeping them from advancing at work and in society. Even community volunteerism—care-taking of the larger community—falls disproportionately on women. This project documents the physical, emotional, and practical effects of these imbalanced burdens.
The Carrying Stones Project also shines a light on the thorny data issues of the gender pay gap, unequal representation of women in higher-paying industries and in leadership positions, and representation of women in the media.
The inequalities that working women face are both systemic and pervasive, and those biases affect individual women differently. As such, the concepts for the Carrying Stones works are viewed through an intersectional lens, and are distilled from the personal narratives of women of diverse ages, races, orientations, working roles, and socio-economic statuses.
Sawyer’s work has been exhibited widely across the US. She is also the President of the Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art.
