Sara Brown

Architecture and Women's & Gender Studies major

I work in the overlap of many thresholds- between identities, bodies, and belief systems.

My work seeks to explore these internal themes with grand external spaces. As a mixed media artist, I sculpt from the discarded: reclaimed garments and textiles, broken objects, and recycled materials. From decay and the forgotten, I create immersive works stretching toward the monumental, offering these remnants a new form and purpose.

Light and time are central, though often invisible, structures within my work. I’m drawn to how they shape perception—how light slips through space, how seconds stretch or collapse depending on what the body endures. By manipulating these elements, I create scenes where the viewer may lose a sense of place, slipping into an embodied response to discomfort, tension, or revelation.

My practice investigates the tensions between autonomy and authority, particularly within systems of religion and societal normativity. Through performance and large-scale sculpture, I ask what it means to inhabit a body that resists containment—one that reclaims space, reshapes expectation, and honors the sacred in the soiled.

Each piece is a kind of ritual—a space where decay becomes devotion, and what has been hidden becomes radiant. I make work that holds both softness and rupture, inviting viewers to see the grotesque as glorious and to feel something shift within themselves.

There's a spiritual aspect to the subversion of seconds. As an artist, I invite the viewer to find confidence and disruption, to see the dirty as beautiful, and to take up space as my art does.

Veinwork

glass, tin/lead solder, clear quartz

Jewett Gallery

square of hanging small squares of glass attached together with solder and jump rings, hanging from a white rod held slightly out from the wall; upper glass pieces are clear, lower are red; at the bottom of each row hangs a quartz crystal; behind the piece is a cast shadow of its silhouette with colored reflections

Veinwork is a hymn for the first woman. This is a stained glass piece that explores the entanglement of Christianity, feminine power, and autonomy through the body’s most sacred and profane symbol: blood.

Working with red and clear glass—materials traditionally associated with sanctity and stiffness—I sought to render them fluid, transformed, and alive. In the act of cutting, I mirrored the ritual of wounding, of shaping pain into meaning. What is often rigid in religious iconography becomes fluid here: the glass bends, bleeds, re-forms. Though Eve was Adam’s wife, and her original sin led to generations of menstrual bleeding and birthing pains, I turn attention to the mythological first wife of Adam, Lilith, the first woman. This piece centers Lilith as both myth and mirror—a figure of exile, rage, fertility, and refusal. Through her, Veinwork becomes a space to contemplate the covenant of the body: how it carries life, death, reproduction, vitality, and revolt. The veins, both seen and implied, map not only blood but lineage, rupture, and resistance. Part hymn, part heresy, Veinwork is a meditation on feminine rage, sacred transformation, and the porous borders between the holy and the forbidden.

small squares of red and clear glass in solder frames, attached into a net-like form with jump rings; the closest red glass squares have textural streaks

clear quartz crystals hanging from twisted metal wire attached via small jump ring to hanging red glass squares with solder frames

grid of hanging clear and red glass squares with solder frames attached via jump rings; the clear glass has various textures and patterns

Hallowed Ground, Unriven

acrylic, velvet, brocade, birch wood, found materials and objects

Jewett/PNW Bridge Alcove

alcove with hanging red curtain and red curtain floor; a person in all black sits on the floor with their back against the wall, a line of dried flowers up the wall corner behind her; outside the alcove is a small table with lace tablecloth, small folding stool, pink slippers, three white birch logs on end with tea candles

Reclamation of privacy and peace.

There is a choreographed ritual we perform in worship and in communion. We lift our eyes to the heavens and lower our bodies in humbling prayer. These gestures hold the weight of tradition, reverence, and discipline. In this work, I reinterpret those movements, reimagining what holiness can look like when filtered through bodies and experiences long left at the margins. Using materials drawn from the architecture of sanctity—glass, velvet, wood—I construct spaces that offer not penance but relief. Where religion has often imposed control, I seek instead to make room for reflection, softness, and refusal. The familiar forms of cathedral windows reappear here, not to instruct, but to affirm. The imagery within these translucent panes resists doctrinal order. It celebrates disobedience shaped by grace, joy forged in tension, and communal belonging outside inherited norms. This installation invites the viewer into a moment of stillness—where time slows, and the body is no longer a site of shame, but of radiant presence.

clear acrylic hanging piece with red and green details, 3 panels; left and right have snakeskin texture and imagery of pomegranates, roses, and a snake; center has form of a woman with visible reproductive organs, rose in the place of the heart, crown, floating hair

small white birch live edge shelf with tea lights, corks, tiny plant, small white wood frame with dried flowers and diagram of flower; dried red and yellow flowers run up a wall corner at right

various small shelves, plants, candles, and objects on a window sill and surrounding walls; a person at right looks at the arrangement

two hands holding a small card with snake, pomegranate, rose design and text 'Thy Body is meant to be devoured'

Illuminated Bodies

acrylic, vinyl

PNW deHoyos Lobby

series of small cut acrylic panels with designs of various stylized figures interacting; the panels have ultramarine, light blue, or green overlays and are arranged in a triangle format

to see more work by Sara: @styled_x_sara

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