ARTIST STATEMENT
I have an insatiable interest in materials—natural, synthetic, domestic, and industrial, as well as, an affinity for their endless juxtaposition. My process is intuitive, requiring preliminary experimentation and manipulation of material or found object. In short, I play with fibers, detritus and light. After years of sewing and constructing forms of cotton rag paper, I have discovered the medium of wax paper. Despite the technical challenges that sewing this household paper presents due to its fragile, brittle and unyielding nature, I continue to be drawn to this unremarkable paper’s remarkably poetic qualities. When fortunate, this intuitive process results in introspective, metaphorical work highlighting the rigors and rituals of human relationships– especially as seen through the mature female gaze.
While emanating from a deeply personal place, the works are meant to inspire interpretation filtered by the viewer’s experience. Certainly, wax paper’s inherent fragility, transparency, disposability, and ethereal constitution contribute to that end. My works often begin from an autobiographical place—with my most recent work speaking to the challenges of what it means to have evolved through our culture as female, and to have emerged as a female of a “certain age”.
Giving form and voice to the unseen and silenced matriarch, this newest work hopes to counter the long-entrenched societal biases regarding mature female purpose, beauty, and sexuality. Always Open/Never Closed, three sewn and embroidered wax paper pouches with its magenta openings suggestive of female orifices is a subtle but powerful ovation for the agelessness of female beauty and sexuality.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sandra Guze is a Connecticut artist who has been creating sewn paper forms and mixed media sculpture for over two decades. Born of second-generation immigrants whose survival skills shaped her religious reuse and reverence for the discarded, she acquired the passions to stitch and to scavenge. After years of sewing forms of fabric and cotton rag paper, she began sewing the humble, household medium of wax paper. Most recently, she has begun to incorporate the projection of shadow, light, and video onto her sewn sculptural forms and installations— evoking a sense of theater and place.
Sandra holds a Masters in Liberal Studies from Wesleyan University where her overlapping interests in visual art, poetry, theater and media were nurtured. Her work has been exhibited throughout New England, New York, and beyond including Real Art Ways, the New Britain Museum of Art, SOHO20, Woman Made Gallery, and Eleftherias Park Art Center in Athens, Greece. She has earned reviews in Art New England and Sculpture Magazine.
In 2022, she attended a full fellowship artist residency at Vermont Studio Center and in 2023 received a capacity-building grant award from MassMoCA. She is currently working on the body of work, A Woman of a Certain Age seeking to provoke dialogue on female age and aging, the vital roles of matriarch and caregiver, and the agelessness of female sexuality.
© Sandra Guze