SARAH TAYLOR KO
Contemporary Mixed Media Art
Design informed by ecology, memory, and traditional cultures.
Every print I make is influenced by my grandma Velma's delight as she pieced quilts for all her grandchildren. She taught herself to sew with the tiniest stitches on flour sacks. She was a master of alchemy transforming seemingly useless scraps into works of art that also kept us all warm. The overlap of ingenuity, thrift, and beauty she embodied inspires me always.
Sea Tangle is another name for the life giving seaweed that washes up on the cliffs by the ocean where I live. It looks a lot like my scribble drawings...and my hair!
Selected hand & heart made surface pattern designs created from paintings, drawings, and woodblock.
Prairie Stories
Prairie Stories began from sketches of my hens Sophie and Nutmeg, and a scrap of lace in my sewing box.
I wanted this collection maximally old-fasioned, so added polka dots, gingham, and calico.
It began to remind me of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books which were a beloved favorite of mine as a child. I drew many of the prairie flowers she mentions like Indian paintbrush, black-eyed Susans, wild roses, and violets.
I researched the Osage Nation, Jack the brindled bulldog, and endangered prairie animals like the Poweshiek Skipperling to include in this heritage collection reimagined for the present.
Kapa Cloth
locating the sacred in the ordinary
Hawaiians were renowned for their fabric making technology in the Pacific. Women pounded mulberry into kapa cloth with a beater carved on 4 sides with lines to create a unique watermark.
Nature provided the palette for decorating the soft cloth: kukui bark for black paint, ukiuki berries for blue, mao blossoms for yellow, and alaea clay for reds.
When the kapa was dry they pressed intricately carved bamboo stamps, ohe kapala, into the ink and then on the cloth to tell a story.
The triangles in rows were the teeth of friend mano, the shark, and meant protection.
Thin wavy lines imitated the manu, seabirds, signifying a journey or homecoming.
Diamond shapes, maka, represented fishnets and abundance, or the eyes of wise ancestors offering guidance and blessing.
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Used for births, burials, festivals, and everyday clothing, kapa was an artistic expression merging a close observation of nature and an experience of the sacred into daily life.
