Sarah Nance

Sarah Nance is an interdisciplinary artist based in installation and fiber. She explores the entanglements of geologic processes and human experience in archived, constructed, and speculative terrains. Her time spent living in the geologies of the Driftless Area, Oregon, Iceland, and eastern Canada has been significant in the development of her research, much of which continues to be based in these regions.

Nance’s current project, "shroud for an ancient sea", draws on a diverse terrain of subsurface meteor craters, fossilized reefs, and exhumed mountain ranges. These 'archived' landscapes are often observable only through fossil records, artifacts, or recorded data. Still, they are inextricably layered within contemporary landscapes, creating entangled strata of geologic and human histories. The site-responsive works in "shroud for an ancient sea" vary from expansive textiles to experimental vocal performances, becoming surface layers that point to complex records of deep time within the geo-anthropic landscape.

Nance is currently Assistant Professor of Integrated Practice in the Harpur College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY-Binghamton in New York. Nance has previously held professorships in Interdisciplinary Art at SMU (Dallas, TX), Fibres & Material Practices at Concordia University (Montréal, QC), and Fiber at Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA). Her work has been performed and exhibited widely, including venues in China, France, Canada, Iceland, South Korea, Germany, and Italy, as well as across the U.S.