Open to Chaos

Lake Worth Beach-based sculptor, designer, and arts educator Sarah Knouse’s free public exhibition “Roots & Remnants” runs through August 2. SARAH KNOUSE / COURTESY PHOTOS

The figures are fragmented and hollow. There, but not there, drips onto the ground. The drips look like the prop roots of a Banyan tree, precariously anchoring the life-size figures, some of which seem to float in the air.

“Roots & Remnants,” an exhibition at the Cultural Council for Palm Beach County’s Solo Gallery, is full of contradictions: organic yet domestic sculptures, fluid yet frozen in time.

Artist Sarah Knouse’s work, on display through Aug. 2, shows the female form alongside architectural elements.

“I…make these assemblages where body parts and figures are being juxtaposed with pieces of lampshades and a wall sconce and furniture legs,” explains Knouse (pronounced Ka-nouse, rhyming with house). “For example, the curve of a spine merges with the curve of a lamp or a candlestick. In other words, artifacts of domesticity, objects from around the home.”

The figures are molds of her own body; the inorganic items come from “all over,” she says. “Some of the items I have found on the street. Some I source from thrift stores. Some of them are gifted to me by friends. Some of them were in my own home.”

ABOVE: Knouse’s sculptures are life-size or larger, as seen in “Cats Cradle.”

Knouse makes molds of the items for use in her art. “I have sort of a collection of these really interesting forms, ornamental forms I’ve been collecting for over ten years,” she says. “By making molds of them, I’m able to amass a library of these things.”

Using these reverse molds, Knouse cast papier mache into the forms.

“Now I can attach all these forms together,” she says, “the shoulder blade becomes the lampshade, and the hip joint shoots off into a wall sconce. So now I have these paper assemblages.”

Then, she coats those forms with resin or fibers.

“Now I’m pouring and draping these forms. It’s open to chance, open to chaos,” she says. “Where the material flows and drops down, I’m open to wherever the material goes.”

The resin hardens in 90 seconds. “Once that cures or becomes hardened on the surface, everything else is removed. The papier mache comes out and is destroyed. It’s like a rebirth. Only the surface remains. You can look through the holes (of the figures.) You feel you are inhabiting the interior of the piece as well. They’re hollow. They exist as the physical memory of the drips or the threads woven across the piece.

Lake Worth Beach-based sculptor Sarah Knouse-’s 2024 sculpture “Reflection” (Daisugi), is wood, resin, and steel.

“It’s part of the excitement of making work, leaving that last bit open to chance and the element of surprise. That’s really what’s in it for me. It’s like when a potter glazes a pot and doesn’t know what it’s going to look like until they take it out of the kiln.”

The sculptures are life-size or larger. “I wish I could work smaller,” Knouse says. “I tend to make sculptures that are bodysized or furniture-sized. I’m dealing with the body with my work.”

Knouse has recently gone through a lot of change and upheaval in her life.

She married and moved to Scotland with her husband, selling everything in Florida and giving up her job. She gave birth to a son, and then they moved back to Lake Worth Beach.

“Everything in my life had changed,” she says. “I was holding a baby; I was looking for a new job because I had sold all of my sculptures. I was offered this wonderful opportunity to make a fuller show. I had to put my studio back together; I had to recenter everything. That’s why this work is so personal for me; they’re some of the pieces I’ve been making after a time of tremendous change in my life.”

Her work, she says, reflects the tension between chaos and control. “It’s oscillating between those two different modes,” she says. “These pieces that I made, aesthetically, I was looking at and become enamored with objects in the world that also carry with them the physical evidence of change. It’s inspired by the form of the Banyan tree. In a lot of these pieces the drips are coming down to support it. That’s derived from that sensibility in a lot of ways.

The figures in Sarah Knouse’s sculptures are molds of her own body. The inorganic items, like lamps, furniture legs and candlesticks, come from different places.

“ T h e Ban”yan tree is a life form taken over by a strangler fig. Over time, the original tree is obscured by the form growing over it and using it as a host. So it’s interesting; it walks this line between a beautiful symbiotic and a parasitic relationship. It’s synonymous with my experience of firsttime motherhood.

“Here’s my identity as a woman, as a professional artist, being changed in so many ways, some wonderful and some challenging. Change is never a straight line. It is messy, and it is chaotic. I hope this aesthetic expresses and honors that sensibility.”

Over the past years, she has changed physically as well.

“I bear new scars; I have a different body shape, a different trajectory of my life and aspirations.”

In addition to the Banyan tree, the artist says she drew inspiration from stalactites. “Water drips from the ceiling and accumulates on the floor into these formations,” Knouse says. “They slowly accumulate over time. What’s fascinating about some of these cave formations is the language that’s used to talk about them. They overlap with domestic terms. When stalactites accumulate across a wall of a cave, it’s called a drapery or a curtain. Sometimes, certain formations are known as chandeliers. And (when a stalactite touches a stalagmite growing from the floor,) it’s called a column.

“It’s a callback to the forms I’ve used in my sculptures for years. It’s an ephemeral and changing face. It’s there and not there. Again, we can think of it as erasure or accretion, which is how I felt trying to reposition myself in the world after so much change. Parts of myself have grown, and parts of myself, my identity, have disappeared.”

This newest body of work is highly personal, she says. “My experiences were informing the new work. My hope is that the viewers find the work approachable and that it’s universally accessible. At times, it’s about my experience of motherhood, but that doesn’t exclude anyone from entering into the work, enjoying it and putting your interpretation on it.”

As an artist, “I feel the artwork is yours until it hits the gallery,” Knouse says. “People have a way of making the work their own, which is flattering to me, that someone wants to engage in the sculpture enough to see themselves in the work.”

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