Sarah Conarro - Select Work Samples 2025
Mirror Painting Mirror Painting links practical life and meditation by combining utilitarian materials with fine art. Conarro developed to encourage a meditative environment in the home. The painting is protected by a clear glass pane and mounted next to glass mirror. The painting and mirror are fastened with bronze screws to a custom 1” thick baltic birch bevelled slab. The piece hangs flush against the wall on a single screw.
Medium: Painting on paper / acrylic mirror / wood
Date: 2021-current
Mirror Painting Mirror Painting
After Sunrise
Media: Mobiles - Wood, Mirror, Colored Glass, Filament
Date: 2020-current
Conarro designed an ongoing series of mobiles of painted wood pieces, acrylic, mirror, and glass with the goal of creating a meditative vibe that responds to light produces a beautiful environment. The wood components are opaque, causing shadows to mix with the reflections on the wall. The brightly colored glass and the bright colors painted on the wood offer bold, vibrant energy. Conarro structured the mobiles across long pieces of wood in order to move the mobiles series for use in events and settings for conversation and/or meditation.
54 5x7s
Media: Collage, Acrylic, Graphite
Date: Ongoing
54 5x7s is an ongoing series of 18 triptychs comprised of 3 works on 5” x 7” paper paired with personal photographs of Conarro’s daughter, Margot. Created on-the-go over a 17 year period, the three components of each triptych are as follows ::
~ fill-in-the blank exercise
~ object drawing
~ collage
The fill-in-the-blank exercise consists of a sentence repeated multiple times. Each time the sentence is repeated, a word is replaced by a blank space. By the final iteration of the sentence, almost all words have been replaced by blank spaces.
The collage is abstract and colorful, created to reflect the myriad emotions that we carry in our relationships with others and ourselves.
The object drawing serves as a subjective glue, connecting the abstract collage on the right with the text on the left.
This series is extremely personal to Conarro yet the pieces are made with the intention of the viewer finding their own connection to each work. What words does a viewer fill in the blanks with? What does each simple everyday object spur the viewer to think about in their own memories? What personal emotions does the viewer consider when viewing the collages?
The fifty-four 5x7s were created in cars, houses, trains, buses, planes, and apartments, allowing Conarro to actually get to work on the project since being ‘in the studio’ has not often been a reality. Because the pieces have travelled with Conarro everywhere she and Margot went for 17 years, they reflect Conarro’s personal story - every high and low - through two child births, loves found then lost, and multiple moves including across the country from Alaska to New York City. Sometimes the weight of this reflection felt too heavy, leading Conarro to almost discard all of the 5x7s in a truckstop trash can in rural Pennsylvania in 2015. The pieces persisted, however, like strong memories one cannot shake.
Our Openness to Variety is What Brings Harmony
Media: cyanotype, collage, gold leaf, charcoal
Date: 2022
Young artists in grades 3rd-5th worked on different of processes to create a cohesive piece considering “Our Openness to Variety is What Brings Harmony.”
Every lesson with cyanotype, gold leaf, charcoal, and drawing, young artists considered the relationships communities have to their land and the connection this brings. The elements of line, texture, color, value, and shape were paired with the principles of unity, rhythm, and variety. Visiting artist Tatiana Arocha came to the student to talk about her process and volley questions she asks in her own work back to young artists about their pieces.
When the Light Hits the Wall
Media: Painted Wood
Date: 2022
When the Light Hits the Wall is an atmospheric wall piece comprising 27 acrylic paintings on diamond-shaped wooden pieces. The 27 diamonds are rearrangeable with no preset format or order. The creative process includes that every morning at sunrise, the light hits the wall where the diamond-shaped paintings hang. It is also notable that for When the Light Hits the Wall hangs in the main communal space of Dreamers Welcome. While works of art are often not shared until they are complete, this piece was on display since its inception, affecting the chromatic mood of Dreamers Welcome, where social engagement projects (dinners, lecture series, etc) are hosted.
Collage + Print Series
Media: Collage, Intaglio, Acrylic
Date: 2010-current
This series of artworks have a common thread of autobiographical content. Conarro’s sister’s cat, cabbage and chickens from the Alaskan gardens, wind and water scenes from Alaska, and a self portrait from Brooklyn.
Our Breasts, Our Stories: Beyond Mastectomy
Media: Collage, Photo Transfer, Watercolor
Date: 2025
Devised by Alaskan writer, mother, and double cancer survivor (breast cancer and ocular melanoma), Rebecca Braun believes in the power of stories to connect us, push us, and help us heal. Within her own experience with breast cancer, Braun reached out to Conarro to collaborate in making a visual portrait to pair with Braun’s writing “Beyond Mastectomy.” Within their text exchange of trying to decide how to best depict Braun’s very personal experience, Braun chose to snap a shirtless selfie and send it to Conarro. Through phototransfer, Conarro worked to produce versions of Braun that are honest and beautiful - first for Braun herself, and second for the upcoming process of inviting women who have experienced breast cancer to join this project.
From Braun:: Thousands of women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year. We are faced with big decisions about our health and our bodies, often with little time, little information, and very little opportunity to learn from others who have traveled this path. Our Breasts, Our Stories aims to capture the voices of women impacted by breast cancer and surgical intervention, and to share our stories about our decisions, our experiences, our bodies, and our feelings. These stories will accompany artistically rendered images intended to help normalize and find beauty in our changed bodies and showcased at a public gallery in Juneau, Alaska in fall of 2025. By sharing stories and images, we can help each other better understand our options, identify and communicate our priorities, and find acceptance. I hope this project helps those facing breast cancer feel less alone in what can be an alienating experience.
(Papier-mâché) Angel Mobiles
Media: wood, Papier-mâché, acrylic
Date: 2020
Starting with shape of a cirlce, Conarro considered the passage of light and air to create repetitive forms out of Papier-mâché and acrylic. The bold colors matches the colors of sunrise in Brooklyn, which is when they were made each day before the nine-to-five began.
Link-Link Club Lecture Series
Media: Social Engagement
Date: 2015-current
Link-Link Club (www.link-link.club) is a community-building lecture series inviting people to become lecturers on any topic outside of their core field of expertise. Link-Link Club encourages talks about anything else - obsessions, off-the-cuff curiosities, personal anecdotes, amateur ‘research’, guilty pleasures, Wikipedia wormhole findings… Painters talk macro-economics. Techies talk royal family gossip. Carpenters talk their favorite poet. After the lecture, everyone mingles and chats over pizza. Since the project’s inception in 2015, Conarro has curated 160 lectures (and counting). Her collaborator, Julian Bozeman, runs producation for every lecture meaning that within project (which is entering its ninth year), the duo has successfully archived hours of community members sharing what they are thinking about that is outside of the regular question, “What do you do for work?”
Conarro is the proud recipient of the One More Hour grant in 2024, a grant focused on in-real-life connection in the face of the loneliness epidemic in the United States.
Intermission:
Media: Social Engagement
Date: Ongoing
Intermission: is a four-course dinner event for femme-identifying individuals to connect with strangers and deepen connections with friends and acquaintances while relaxing and nourishing the mind and the body. Photos of each guests’ hand is documentation of who was present. During dinner, guests are invited to take hand-written, approachable questions from bowls around the table as entry points of dialogue. For every new course, Conarro presents a new seating arrangement. Guests change their seats and are surrounded by new people, new cuisine, and new circumstances. As they leave, guests are given a printed original work of two hands in a gesture of offering created by Conarro for the event.
Intermission: wants to take away the reasons why gathering as women is so challenging. All women face different obstacles that keep them from gathering and building community, leaving few opportunities for multigenerational exchange. This project aims to create an intermission from these constraints.