Artist Series: Sarabeth Domal
Part I of II
An interview, a conversation, an interrogation, a manifesto. This is the first edition of the Lucky Rigatoni Artist Series. I value the searching, the longing, the process. These conversations are gently edited for clarity. Thank you to Sarabeth for sharing her work and herself, and always, for everything. Our conversation will be published in two parts — the second part coming next Tuesday. You can find more of Sarabeth’s work on her website.
Kelsey Swintek: Alright perfect, um, so should we jump right in?
Sarabeth Domal: Yeah.
KS: So I sent you my questions, but to start, I’ll introduce you and you can let me know if I missed anything.
Sarabeth Domal is an American artist currently based in London, pursuing a Masters in Photography at the Royal College of Art. Her work has been featured in print in concrete nature/out of office and the waiting room; and exhibited in London (virtual) and in Brooklyn.
SD: Yeah I think that’s right. I had — I’ll send you the details — I had one photo in a thing in Portugal like two years ago that I forgot about.
KS: Um did you never tell me about it? What was it?
SD: I don’t think I told anyone. It was just like a random photo that I sent. It was one of my photos that I took in Lyon in France. I submitted it to this exhibition and they printed it for me and hung it up and now I don’t even know where it is.
KS: That’s crazy. Is that how things kind of go? In the world of fine art?
SD: It’s interesting. I used to spend a lot of my time, energy, and also money submitting to open calls, as I’m sure you do as a writer. Sometime last year when everything kind of went online, I was so jaded with the idea of me spending hours on my computer making something and not being able to see it on a wall or see it physically in front of my nose. And then it just going online. Especially after my experience with the WiP show–which was all pretty positive just something that I realize I never really want to do again. I just kind of stopped. I would only really apply to things that are print based. Which there are not many of! So I just don’t really do that anymore and I’m trying to take time now to focus on my artistic practice and refine it instead of focusing on churning out work for things that cost like forty pounds and are like sixty percent commission based. It’s completely insane the way that these things are structured.
KS: Wow.
SD: Yeah.
KS: The more you know. Would you be able to share some inspirations for your work? For me, top of mind, I think of the poem from your senior exhibit at Kenyon, but just like anything you can think of — can be specific, can be broad, just let it rip.
SD: Yeah so that poem specifically is something that I return to every day of my life. I first encountered the poem in an English class at Kenyon. The professor had accidentally printed it out without the last stanza. So for the first six months that I had this poem in my life, I had not actually read the last stanza of it, which I found fascinating because now it’s my favorite part of the poem. It’s a poem by Robert Haas, a former US poet laureate, and he wrote the poem in response to an abstract painting by Gerhard Richter. Gerhard Richter is a German Abstract Expressionist painter who’s been around forever and he creates paintings like unbelievably fast and he puts out so much work and he makes so much work and for him it’s a lot about the process. And he’s had a lot of phases in his life where he’s created different types of work, he’s sometimes done photography but he also kind of hates photography which I find really attractive.
So the part of the poem that I always return is :
or to render time or stand outside
the horizontal rush of it
That’s something that I’ve always tried to emulate with my work. When I first encountered the poem it really spoke to the way that I make photographs. Trying to pick apart memories and the time that makes up those memories and that those memories consist of. Just try and examine them as closely and as far away as possible. I don’t know if that makes any sense.
So Robert Haas and his poetry are very influential to me. Also Gerhard Richter’s paintings in general. He tends to paint things and then destroy them, and he’s famous for squeegeeing his painting work. He’s famous for painting over photographs that he’s taken. All of that was really influential when I was trying to kind of find out what my day to day practice and process is as an artist.
An another artist, another huge artist, Hiroshi Sugimoto, who is famous for lots of different things, but the works I always return to are these long exposure photographs of cinemas — like empty movie theaters — in which the seating and the kind of surrounds of the theaters are perfectly in view but the long exposure meant that the film that was showing is just a white washed-out screen. That helped get me thinking about how I use long exposure in my practice.
And then someone like, hold on I wrote this down, because I never remember names off the top of my head.
KS: I don’t know anyone who does.
SD: Tacita Dean is another landscape photographer. She does a lot of amazing type-like printing techniques. She incorporates writing — handwriting in her work a lot which is something that I’m not like trying to do, it’s something that I’ve always just been thinking about. Because I do do some writing sometimes when I feel like it and I’ve always wondered how I can marry those two practices together into one cohesive moment but I haven’t been able to figure that out.
In a similar vein to Gerhard Richter is Anselm Kiefer, who is a German Abstract Expressionist painter. He’s very melancholic and his work is very German so obviously I don’t really connect with it on that level. But he uses material in a way that I find fascinating. He layers paint and sand and wood and lots of tapestry and some linen fabrics and all of these straw things and his canvases are so heavy. I’ve always looked to him kind of in the way he uses color and material to create a very specific, very melancholic mood in his paintings.
Other inspiration wise I like other than Robert Haas, writing wise, this guy Robert MacFarlane who writes about nature and the words we use for nature and the way we think about deep time and landscape. He writes in such a way that it’s accessible and you don’t really have to know that much about the world around you to dive into what he’s saying and to really understand.
In a similar way, Richard Powers, he writes novels. But he’s amazing. The Overstory was influential in me just trying to get into the mindset of trees when I was writing my dissertation — if one can even manage to do that, I don’t know.
KS/SD: Giggles
SD: And then two other poets are:
Daisy Lafarge who writes about very minuscule levels of nature like bacteria and air but she writes it in such a transmutative way that connects it into her personal life in a way that’s really opaque still but also accessible I guess.
And then Louise Glück who I’m just - she is just great.
KS: Yeah your mom gave me her collection.
SD: Really?
KS: Yeah for Christmas like four years ago.
SD: What the fuck mom?
KS: It rocks.
KS/SD: Giggles
SD: And then also you are an inspiration—
KS: Cut! I’m cutting that out.
KS/SD: Raucous laughter.
SD: And your backyard.
KS: Obviously it seems like you’re very entrenched with art with a capital and lowercase A (art/Art). Like you’re naming working and deceased artists and also writers which I really like the confluence that you very seamlessly can take from writing and take from visual and it’s not really a problem or feels that different to you. But if you were hard pressed to name anything that’s outside of like what you would consider “Art” — what would you name as your inspirations?
SD: That’s such a good question. I would say - I don’t know if music falls into this, the high or nice art category —but music forever. There are so many emotions that can be evoked and communicated through musical notes and tones and production that I still haven’t really found a way to communicate visually. The music that I’m listening to when I make work is so influential to the work at the end of it.
I made a video work last year which was like was my first video piece where I probably really quite illegally used a song by Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst– a very short snippet of a song. I manipulated the music because I wanted to communicate the length of time that it takes me to make a work, so I slowed it down to the point where it was distorted beyond recognition.
The way that music and lyrics can be combined to evoke memory is so, as you know, and you know me, is so evocative. Just like Bruce Springsteen himself, and anyone writing in that genre, and anyone from our part of the world. I think that that is definitely the most influential.
Other than that, because I have experience as a graphic designer, sometimes I have a hard time being more organic and so I tend to be really organized. So when I see great design, that always gets my juices going.
But I would say that I do rattle off these great artists but you’ve been to museums with me, and I think Nik has started to notice this as well (this is a little off the cuff), but I get really annoyed at conceptual art even though my art is so conceptual.
KS: Laughs
SD: For me, I want immediate recognition of what I’m looking at. And when something is either way too refined or way too unrefined, if I can’t connect with it immediately then I kind of just move along. So I’m always taking in what’s happening in the art world but I don’t necessarily see myself as someone who is trying to put herself in that narrative at the moment. I’m just trying to see how I can work better and deeper and not necessarily follow along with what’s going on.
The artists I’ve named as my influences are so successful and they are fully represented by these corporately structured galleries. What I’m trying to do at the moment is to learn a little bit more about how my peers are working and see what they’re looking at and what they’re reading, so I can kind of, not move away from those names and those titles and those shows, but see how people are operating on a much more minute level. Because I think that’s sometimes more important than some gallery showing a collection of work that has been shown a million times before in a completely different context, if that makes sense.
KS: That does make sense. It sounds too that you’re interested in seeing more. Which I think artists or, like everyone, can relate to that feeling of wanting to consume as much as possible.
It feels very apt that we are conducting this interview now, where at least in Western Pennsylvania, “leaf-peeping” is in full swing. So for most people who are reading this interview, who have not read your thesis, could you briefly talk about the ideas that you addressed and fleshed out in your distinction-earning thesis last year?
SD: Yes! I’m thrilled to talk about it. So “leaf-peeping" was a term that I had not actually heard —I mean I’m sure I’d heard it before — but it never really absorbed in my brain until at some point last year in August or so. I had always understood the idea that Fall is leaf-peeping season without the term “leaf-peeping” and I found it so unbelievably loaded and weird. It’s not a thing in the UK and so when I started to describe it, “leaf-peeping” the term, to people who are British, there would be a very visceral and physical recoil because of the way it sounds. The idea of “peeping” at something is quite creepy. So when I first heard it, I was just fascinated because as a landscape photographer, I’m always trying to personally overanalyze how I’m looking at nature and how I’m interacting with nature and what type of biases I’m approaching nature (with) when I photograph.
When I started to really think about leaf-peeping —the practice of it, who engages with it, what it means, how photography is involved—I started to get really interested in our (our meaning our species, the human species, and our generation) general visual culture when it comes to nature and how this relates to climate change and climate breakdown. Which is an incredibly relevant topic at the moment, but I’m not necessarily looking at the science of it, just the way that imagery can shape our associations and dissociations of how nature is affected by climate change.
The tutor who supervised my thesis, who is this amazing writer named Alice Butler, encouraged me to write auto-ethnographically, using research methods applied to my own personal anecdotes. I chose to write about an imagined road trip through Northeastern Ohio, and think about how leaf-peeping plays out specifically there, how I have leaf-peeped there, how the idea of leaf-peeping can be applied to a much wider range of voyeurism in nature other than specifically leaves in the fall. Writing the dissertation was amazing, it kind of challenged my artistic practice in a way that I really didn’t expect, and it’s actually made it really difficult for me to get anything done in the past six months since I’ve handed the thesis in. I’ve started to think about my work in a very ecologically-oriented way that I hadn’t before. It hasn’t necessarily invalidated my previous work, but it’s making it difficult for me to just relax and give in to my practice now that I'm thinking about the way I photograph nature, from the perspective of nature itself.
KS: Mmm. I’ve never thought about it that way. I think as a writer, I assumed reading your thesis that obviously it speaks to your practice of art, but kind of in a more separate way than I ever would have understood or realized.
SD: And that something I kind of wrote about in the last mini-chapter of my dissertation was how when I developed my very specific photographic practice —which involves long exposure photographs that are taken in a specific structure of a grid, and then they are processed and then re-layered digitally. What I thought I was doing was recreating memories to me that were painterly and not necessarily all that complete. It was a process that was a journey to refining those memories, or reliving those memories, or something along those lines. I had all those photographs from that specific period of time that I wrote about in the dissertation. The photographs were of nature and they were of trees in Ohio and they were very much supplanted in that landscape. I was always thinking about the memories and not actually about the landscape. Memory and landscape are now so convoluted for me, I’ve been struggling to make work in a similar vein. What I’m doing now is changing my process to see how that disrupts the connotations of the land within the art.
I was looking for writers and thinkers that could help explain why visual culture these days leads us to see a reality within the land that is not actually connected to the ecological reality of the land. So in leaf-peeping specifically, we see these amazing pictures of very neon oranges and bright reds and the trees are fluttering and leaves falling very daintily. What we don’t actually see is that when the leaves change color early, it means that they (the trees) are distressed because of how warm and wet winters are getting, or extreme weather and extreme heat in the summer can disrupt these trees’ natural cycles. And it is just one facet of climate breakdown, but I think it’s an interesting micro-case study of how we are so disconnected from reality—that we’re just looking for these ethereal moments within the landscape that can kind of challenge the idea that the landscape as we know it and as we’ve made it is kind of coming to a crawling end.
KS: Yeah, it’s so interesting too, even pushing that point further, I bring up Taylor Swift’s short film, and it's funny because we were talking about music before, I know you’re not a fan, she just re-released Red, and released a film with it, so again like, music, writing and visual all together, but I'm presuming you have not seen the film?
SD: I’m clicking on the link that you sent me now. Oh my god–there’s leaves.
KS: Yes! The whole point of Red is that it’s “an autumn album.” It’s meant to be seasonal and about the fall. So then everything you’re saying, but then on such an elevated platform that it’s Taylor Fucking Swift, promoting the consumerism of the distress of the climate. And it’s also because it’s a seasonal change, it’s something that we tend to factor in a routine way, and kind of count on, when it’s probably not gonna be this way forever, because of the way the world is going.
SD: Yeah for sure. And it’s like — I’m watching the trailer for this now — there is something that is so incredibly human about not being able to de-romanticize the golden afternoon light in the autumn. It’s beautiful, you can’t take yourself out of that feeling. It’s impossible. To disconnect from that is not what I’m suggesting —it’s more, how can we experience both at the same time? How can we understand that while this is a truly, truly truly sublime moment that I’m looking at and that I’m witnessing and that I’m trying to keep with me forever by photographing, but how can I also at the same time understand that this landscape is undergoing destruction, specifically because of the actions of our species? The very convoluted nature of the environment that we have created and altered. That’s what I’m looking to figure out. I didn’t make any conclusions in my essay but it’s something that I’m continuing to think about and hoping to continue to think about forever because I don’t think it’s possible.
