ARTIST STATEMENT
This 1950s style sewn wax paper bra is illuminated with two flickering blue lights (simulating gas flames) and straddles a worn and forbidding iron stove grate. It is facetious commentary on our culture’s propagation of demeaning imagery, symbolism, and language surrounding female anatomy.
The piece is from my current collection, “A Woman of a Certain Age” (supported in part by a 2024 grant from the Puffin Foundation)– a project that intends to upend this politically correct label and to counter biases of mature female purpose, beauty, power and sexuality. While definitely emanating from an autobiographical and deeply personal place, it is my hope that the resulting works inspire the requisite dialogue between viewers of every background, gender, identity or age in order to begin dismantling this age-old injustice.
This work and this entire body of sculptural narratives seek to lift the dark shadow of systemic obsolescence that is forcibly cast onto “a woman of a certain age”– an undeserved closing curtain of diminishment that often renders her invisible in a society where all that is shiny, superfluous, and youthful is more readily elevated and commodified.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sandra Guze has been creating sewn paper forms and mixed media sculpture for over three decades. Born of second-generation immigrants whose survival skills shaped her 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’s discovered wax paper and continues to explore this unremarkable paper’s remarkably poetic qualities. Recently, she’s begun to incorporate the projection of shadow, light, and video onto her sewn wax paper forms– resulting in theatrical, tableau-like installations exuding mystery and metaphor.
Guze holds a Masters in Liberal Studies from Wesleyan University where her diverse but overlapping curiosities in visual art, poetry, theater and media were nurtured. Her work has been exhibited throughout New England, New York, and beyond including CT’s Real Art Ways, New Britain Museum of Art, SOHO20 in NYC, Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, and Eleftherias Park Art Center in Athens, Greece. She has earned reviews in Art New England and Sculpture Magazine. In 2022, she was awarded a full fellowship residency at Vermont Studio Center. In 2023, she completed the Assets4Artists program via a capacity-building grant from MassMoCA. In 2024, she received a Puffin Foundation grant in support of her latest works incorporating light, shadow, video and for her project A Woman of a Certain Age. This past summer her innovative sewn wax paper work from that project was featured in the international publication, Fiber Art Now. Recently, she was recognized with a 2025 Connecticut Artist Fellowship Award.
© Sandra Guze