Domesticating orange 2007 | James Dorahy Project Space

​Sarah Newall fabricates nature from everyday domestic culture by creating paintings out of pooled acrylic house paint and floral bouquets from crocheting acrylic yarn.  Newall’s monochromes are continuing to simplify and unify experience from the chaos and clutter that is daily life.  Newall is tapping into the idea that identity as a socially constructed idea that is formed out of interaction with ones community.  If this is true then, the everyday becomes central to the ongoing process of acquisition or invention of signifiers to align with and identify with.  The ‘special’ parts of the everyday start to take on nostalgic views of time and place, creating an index of timely importance.  Everyday objects then have two functions first in the sense that they are ‘working’ items and second that they are ‘special’ in that they double as an index to things that are greater than mundane everydayness.  They are the things that embrace the pragmatics of operating a lifestyle and the signifiers to align with.  Newall has added to the objects through their reproduction in pooled paint and crochet, and that is everyday craft and creativity.  Handcraft also becomes a self-indenting process, as the world is abstracted and recreated under her own terms.  The reconstruction of everyday objects then becomes part of the identity building index. What is experienced, interpreted, becomes an ongoing feed back loop of input, reflection, assimilation, output, reflection, assimilation…and so on.  Artists like Newall that work from appropriation of vernacular culture are tapping into and expanding on the signifiers that the community identifies with.