Sage

Sage explores metaphors for personal narratives through the construction and deconstruction of weaving and quilting techniques. Her work draws upon historical methods of weaving and quilting in Southern Appalachia, where she was born and raised, and challenges their traditional functionality by valuing ingenuity and materiality. She incorporates found fibers in her work, resembling an honest economical status and the necessity of resourceful making. The effort to piece together materials that wouldn’t commonly correspond shifts between stitching together individual fibers and merging fabrics from separate countries to explore multi-cultural identity. Fabrics are married together through hand-manipulation as a metaphor for minimizing the distance separating both peoples and countries. Other works investigate the concept of gradual image development by combining weaving structure with the viewer’s movement to relate to the analog photography process of developing an image. Sage’s work further questions the differences between analog and digital experience by combining cellphone images into one final woven negative. Cellphone images taken in two separate cities are handwoven together, eliminating separation of place and materializing the hybrid virtual space that exists when talking to someone on the phone. Weaving therefore represents transcending borders, boundaries, and physical distance between countries and people.