Sarah Rose Lejeune
No one is here right now

Media: Cast handmade paper (cotton, abaca, linen, rag, shredded office paper, cardboard).  

Artist Statement:
The doorway existed before the door did. The entrance, or exit, a hole before it could be closed. At times representing choice, opportunity, a sense of portal, doors are contradictory. They can be locked and sealed, blockages, desires for private or interior space. 

Somewhere between traditional craft processes and bricolage, my work across media expresses this simultaneous desire for completeness and a patience with the unformed. My recent work is mimetic, a re-presentation of the ordinary as an essential record of personal and cultural information. Fragments of interior space, like doors and floors, are architectural, implied, close to universally known. When isolated, their details can appear as simultaneously extrinsic and intrinsic: sharp but evading full focus, referencing interior life to the point of taking the viewer elsewhere.  "No one is here right now" is the full text of the poem "Bliss and Grief" by Marie Ponsot. These cast doors suggest salvage, a kind of imaginary place. Unfulfilled but not yet disappointed, future nostalgias. These things that are "household" possess history beyond their ubiquity. Evoking elegy, imagination, potential, "No one is here right now" draws focus to the surfaces and contours around which the picture of our experiences form. 

.

Biography

Sarah Rose Lejeune is a sculptor, papermaker, artist originally from Massachusetts. She graduated with High Honors in Studio Art from Oberlin College. She has followed various opportunities for residency, work and education at The Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland, OH, The Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY, The Dirt Palace in Providence, RI, Dieu Donné in Brooklyn, NY, and more. SR completed the Core Fellowship Program at the Penland School of Craft in the Winter of 2018. She continues to work at Penland as the Books and Paper Studio Coordinator, and maintains a steady studio practice.