Collection: Poems, Sara Malpass & Sara Hess // Blue Boy, Savannah, GA

Poems, Sara Malpass & Sara Hess 

Aunt Marge’s window looked out toward her garden, an overgrown bed of flowers, weeds, and hours spent. After she passed, Sara Hess spent a week in her Aunt Marge’s home, sorting through her late great-aunt's accumulations. Hess looked out the kitchen window and saw the garden, but also the 

A-Jax Soap 

Rabbit 

Green vine spilling over 

Glass Vase 

Sponge 

Sara Malpass approached each morning in her studio at NIAD Art Center with a similar culling. Lists spill down the length of her page, one word bridging to the next as Malpass takes inventory of the letters, syllables, and sounds–piles of seemingly disparate ideas. 

Walls 

Wedge 

Whose 

When 

emerges as an exercise in alliteration or, perhaps, an interest in the undulating line of a “W.” 

22. mirrors 

23. however 

24. un clear 

is more difficult to probe. In these more poetic reflections, images surface. 

Letters and words traverse the work in Poems. Malpass’s intuitive lists are simultaneously intimate and distant. Alongside the artist, we glimpse the content of her unconscious but can never fully enter, left to guess at the threads connecting one word to the next. Hearts and flowers that float across her paintings become surprising windows; words filling the petals, centers, and halves peer quietly through. 

Texts from Malpass’s drawings slip sideways down and off the page, climbing the arms and legs of Hess’s sculptures. Arches summon us inward as letters and words, seemingly clipped from a longer story, trail and twist up the forms like vines. You get a little, but not enough. “Tell me” curls across a large, earthen arch. These whispered messages unfurl when we listen closely. In another instance, paper pulp and chicken wire form an oversized iron, pressing out the wrinkles to leave a clear image beneath. Like Hess, we see the

A-Jax Soap 

Rabbit 

Green vine spilling over 

Glass Vase 

Sponge 

but the garden through the window is a haze of light: green, orange, and pink.

//

Exhibition dates: September 19-October 31, 2024

Opening reception: September 19th, 6-9 PM

Blue Boy

406 E 65th Street

Savannah, GA 31405