A tangled nest of interwoven limbs rendered in pastel pinks and blues. A silky ribbon affixed to skin with safety pins. Corded phone lines and strings of pearls that snake around hands and feet. For artist Sarah Slappey, the body is both subject and setting. It entrances and repels, can be beautiful and grotesque. Above all, it is a means of artistic exploration that defies neat categorization.
In Slappey’s world, skin takes on a rubbery sheen, breasts sport hornlike nipples, nails sprout tiny flames of fire. A body’s vitality is expressed in bleeding limbs and playful gestures, and yet there is a disconnect between the recognizable extremities we see in Slappey’s paintings and drawings and the anatomy of the human form. Her work is not figurative. It avoids the worshipful representation of the feminine body we see in so many classical works of art—painstaking renderings of curves, hips, breasts, and the like. Instead, Slappey deconstructs the corpus piece by piece. She pays careful attention to the details of her work, her precision almost reverent in its execution. But the body itself, while the subject, is not the point.
While Slappey’s approach as an artist has evolved over time, the underlying motifs have remained constant. She has experimented with scale, medium, and composition, but always returns to the body. Her most recent exhibition at Sargent’s Daughters, entitled Self Care, included both huge canvases and smaller works on paper. Much of her work skews large—hands become the size of a poster; toes stretch six inches—and Slappey enjoys experimenting with scale, a process that challenges her as an artist. “The mental exercise of switching from a twelve-by-eleven-inch work on paper to a nine-foot canvas keeps me on my toes and excited about the imagery,” she explains. Scale also changes her relationship to a subject, along with its potency. “Small images tend to feel like thoughts or reflections to me; very large objects have more action or intimidation to them,” Slappey says. “Those associations change the tenor of a piece in completely opposite directions.” This becomes clear when considering her works side-by-side. The prick of a pushpin carries the weight of a sword in a large-scale work, its smaller counterpart eliciting pain on a lesser level.
The artistic process behind her paintings and drawings is consistent, but not linear. “I like to have a few concurrent practices going at the same time: drawing, painting on canvas, and painting on paper,” Slappey explains. Yet regardless of her ultimate ambitions for a piece, she always begins with drawing before moving to the canvas. Both are laborious and timely, but each in its own way. Painting is a slower process, one that lends itself to finer detailing. “Smaller works on paper have a kind of experimental freedom that feeds larger paintings,” she says, “and larger paintings help me work out things I want to dive into more deeply when it comes to small work.”
In her recent works, Slappey explores everyday rituals like shaving, bathing, and applying lipstick. These acts are second nature to so many of us, but what happens when you consider them as part of a larger whole? Her paintings seem to argue that these actions, no matter how minute, cannot be isolated from their sociological implications. Shaving, for example, is “personal, political, sexual, and, if you cut yourself badly, medical,” she explains. “But it’s such a quiet, non-event in our lives that it just gets lumped into automated women’s rituals.”
Her work awakens her audience to the extent to which we are inured to these rituals. If we nick our skin while shaving, do we think anything of it? But what if someone purposefully cuts us with a razor? There is pain involved in plucking eyebrows, waxing pubic hair, and injecting fine lines. We take scissors and tweezers and hot wax strips to ourselves without really thinking twice, systematically attacking what we’re told is unfeminine or unattractive. What we’re left with, besides the pain, is a single, homogenized version of “woman.” In portraying anatomical elements that seem unconnected to an actual body, Slappey is reminding us how separate from our true selves we become with every attempt to tame what is natural. We are both willing practitioners and unwill ing victims in this cultural practice. “Living in a human body is full of both tenderness and violence,” Slappey explains. “Cells are being destroyed and regenerated all the time. Your skeletal system is a protective armature but is culturally a powerful symbol of death and decay. The body encapsulates this paradox completely.” The human price of self-care—in a way, the price of scarifying our own humanity—is steep. The old moniker “beauty is pain,” has never felt so apropos.
But there is never just one layer to these works. Their implications are as tangled as the compositions themselves, constantly daring us to dig deeper. “I spend countless hours with each painting,” says Slappey, “so there is much more than one or two emotions or tidy explanations for each piece.” Beyond the body, traditional images of femininity abound. Glinting earrings, well-tied bows, painted nails, and braided hair are all recurring motifs. A more subtle reference to feminine ideals comes in the form of painted backgrounds that feature gingham prints, daisies, and pale pinks. Yet for every hint of feminine softness, there is a corresponding violence. Lipstick becomes blood, earrings pierce skin, nails claw and ribbons restrain. Slappey’s imagery embodies the conflict of violence and softness that lives within all of us. “I think a lot about femininity and violence and how they are intertwined or are perhaps even the same thing,” Slappey states. “As a concept, femininity can be so insidious and grotesque, and I find that incredibly fascinating.”
Violence, sexuality, the female form; these are serious subjects, and Slappey explores them with nuance and honesty, but also with a touch of humor. Self Care was in itself one overarching joke, a nod to the absurdity of the ‘self-care’ industry and its mental and physical costs. The title was multilayered in its meaning, but, at its core, was a simple play on words. It was funny. “I think people are afraid to laugh with art,” Slappey says. “But there is an absurdity of gender roles that I can’t help laugh at sometimes… I always think my work is humorous or ridiculous (in addition to sad, appealing, dark, luscious, etc.) because that’s the kind of imagery I want to spend my life with, and I think it’s an accurate reflection of humanness and being a woman.”
This rabbit hole seems to have no end and, unsurprisingly, Slappey remains in-demand. With upcoming group shows in the U.S. and two solo shows in Europe, she has a busy stretch of time ahead. It’s well-earned recognition and a nod to the singularity of what she is doing. But still, it’s the work itself that tethers her, not gallery openings or biennales. “More importantly,” she says, “I’m looking forward to being back in my normal groove in the studio where I can keep playing and experimenting with new imagery and ideas.”
