Sara Hubbs

My work is grounded in both formal materiality and relational experiences, looking at concepts of care, intimacy and temporality. The source materials are embedded with meaning, and transform across various processes and situational placements echoing the constant re-arranging of self in relationship to others. Influenced by my experience as mother and daughter, the work often references the doubling or folding of time, identity and value.

Garden Pool and The Hope of Gesture were created during the covid-19 pandemic while I was at home with my child as she attended online school. During this time, I used my middle-aged body to create singular objects from discarded mass-produced containers whose shelf-life had expired. Blowing glass, sweating through the repetitive movements, learning to handle larger quantities of hot glass on my own, became my way to resist societies expectations of my use value and the shelf-life of the female body. Often, I’d take my daughter with me to the hot shop where I blew glass while she did her school work.

Garden Pool

Garden Pool consists of a large glass vessel created from toy containers, while the small vases were made during glass-blowing classes I stared during the pandemic. The variation in size, color, quality is a record of that time, and a way to bring to the forefront the repetitive work that goes into the craft of glass blowing and the work of a mother. The sprigs of plants cut from outside are placed in the vessels and allowed to decay over the course of the exhibition.

The Hope of Gesture

The Hope of Gesture consists of a custom printed fabric with images of my body, my daughter’s body and plastic toy containers arranged like a kaleidoscope. The word kaleidoscope translates to beautiful form watcher. The work is flag-like, held up by a piece of re-bar with a glass hook resting on its folded fabric. The title inverts the words the-gesture-of-hope. Instead of a symbolic gesture, what we hope for is action, the possibility in doing, the meaning in movement, expression, and feeling.