Artist Statement
Raised in central Indiana and currently based in the Southern Tier of New York State, Sara Kramer (b. 1994) is an artist who works in the uncomfortable spaces between 2d and 3d, art and craft, highbrow and lowbrow. Her practice incorporates soft sculpture, crochet, quilting, garment making, and drawing, using the interplay of image and object to create often humorously recursive bodies of work that mirror and distort. Highly saturated colors and tacky patterns feature heavily in Kramer’s work; an attraction to kitsch drives the collection of secondhand materials repurposed for a new life as art objects.
Kramer uses colored pencil on smooth paper for her drawings, sometimes working with a looser more childlike technique, other times with an almost overly tight pseudo-realism. There is always a negotiation between dimensional rendering and maintaining flatness. These drawings usually refer to related objects of crochet or fabric. Crochet, quilting techniques, and sewing are used to create garments, wall hangings, and more dimensional soft sculptures. A palette of highly saturated colors featuring garish chartreuse and traffic cone orange persists through the work. Pastels and deeper hues are incorporated as they appear in the highly patterned thrift store fabrics that Kramer chooses for their cheerfully ugly personalities.
Translation is of interest to Kramer’s work. Beginning with recycled fabrics, either cut out of old clothing or as leftovers from a previous crafter’s project, she translates first to the language of the object or sculpture, then to the language of the image or drawing. If this seems repetitive or recursive, that’s because it is. There is a tongue-in-cheek playfulness and sense of irony to the idea of translating a fundamentally corny or ugly textile pattern, meant for use by hobbyists and home crafters, into an ostensibly serious work of art. Kramer breaks the rules of good taste; the mass produced, the camp, the failed object all receive new life through the artist’s process.
The notion of craft and domestic labor are always at play; Kramer deals not with the higher Crafts of woodcarving, textile weaving, or pottery, but with the base techniques and materials of the home hobbyist. Crochet and sewing were the livelihood of many women throughout history, but around the middle of the 20th century in America, they became the “productive” past time of the housewife. Free time was filled with the creation of functional but essentially needless decorative items. Kramer seeks to extend the life of these techniques and materials, not directly through their aforementioned past uses, but by bringing them into a new light, as being a fit language for more complex ideas.