My current body of work focuses primarily on objects that are themselves traces of what has come before them, of what has already lived and is now in a state of decay. These lifeless remnants are melancholic in that they are reminiscent of their prior, living forms. Though these organic elements are often overlooked in their natural settings, their intricacies and complex histories bring a grace to death’s process and merit acknowledgment.

This honoring of transience and decay is central to the concept of wabi-sabi, a Japanese aesthetic that describes a specific form of beauty. Divergent from a traditionally Western appreciation of perfection and grandeur in nature, wabi-sabi

is about the minor and the hidden, the tentative and the ephemeral: things so subtle and evanescent they are invisible to vulgar eyes […] Things wabi-sabi are unstudied and inevitable looking. They are understated and unassuming, yet not without presence or quiet authority.

– Leonard Koren in Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

The wabi-sabi aesthetic does not only address natural objects; it is also applicable to such things as crumbling buildings and rusted bridges. Both extensive use and abandonment of these human-created structures initiates the slow process of their eventual return to organic states of being.

Wabi-sabi adopts the belief that everything is either “devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness.” My pieces are created from or depict elements that are balanced on the edge of this nothingness. They are indeed traces of what has preceded them. Yet, they are also to be acknowledged for what they are currently: visual historians quietly embodying their complex, fragile beauty, awaiting their certain demise.

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Sarah Nance