Sarah FitzSimons
Ohio
 
Sarah FitzSimons works with oceans, deserts, rivers, and mountain ranges, exploring collisions of the physical and metaphoric. Her work combines outdoor sculpture, photography and video, and ranges from temporary interventions to permanently placed work. She has exhibited in cities across the United States, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Long Beach, Cleveland, and Atlanta, and has installed numerous pieces outdoors. FitzSimons is originally from Cleveland Ohio (b 1977), but until recently has been living and working in Los Angeles.  She received a BFA in Sculpture and a BA in Political Science from Ohio University in 2000, and an MFA in 2005 from the University of California, Los Angeles.  For the 2007-08 academic year, FitzSimons taught as a Visiting Professor in Sculpture at Ohio University, and is returning this fall to teach one more year before moving back to the west coast. This past January, she completed a month-long residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony for February and March. 

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The piece FitzSimons has built at I-Park developed and changed extensively as she worked on the site over the course of 12 days. Originally she planned to construct an undulating line from dimensional lumber, possibly a meandering fence, which would interact with the immediate landscape. After choosing the site, she decided to have the lumber drape over and loop around a large, beautifully-curved, fallen tree trunk. She was interested in the juxtaposition of the old trunk with this ‘new’ lumber that was precisely angled, tightly joined, and sanded. 

She can’t say that the piece means specifically one thing, but FitzSimons had a number of thoughts as she was building that directed my endeavors. As she pieced together the form, she thought about this wooden loop as if it were a necklace, (delicate necklace made from large boards of construction-grade lumber) gently placed over the tree trunk. FitzSimons thought about the absurdity, but also beauty, of taking the lumber, which was cut and milled for right-angled construction, and letting it wander in a more free-form manner. She thought about what it means to take this lumber back to the woods, and the conversation (formally, and conceptually) it would have with the fallen tree. The places where the lumber overlaps with the tree, where there is a direct contact of these two types of wood become especially beautiful to me. The trunk and the lumber are both ‘dead wood’. They will both decompose together, recycle into the forest floor together. But for now, they have an interaction.