SARAH BELNAP

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Sarah Belnap

In the series, Traces of a Journey, Sarah Belnap recorded her experience of traveling across the Utah desert and the manner in which her sense of self is derived from the landscape. Scattering the objects that ensure her survival in this environment across her large drawings, Belnap created a personal iconography, marking her progress through the journey. In the first drawing from this series, three shirts hang near the center of this work, each realized to a different degree. The shift in the artist's mark, from heavy realism to a mere abstract outline, seems to indicate the transience of vision within this environment, while the shirts, and specifically the number three, make reference to spiritual symbolism. Although these works function as her personal maps, she allows the viewer to project themselves into the spaces. In the second work from Traces, the artist used her hiking stick to organize the space and communicate a sense of direction across the plane in which the viewer participates in by walking along the horizon of the drawing.