Sarah E. Jenkins

I am a multidisciplinary artist working in stop motion animation, drawing, and social practice. My work is inspired by post-industrial landscapes, labor, systems, and repetitive processes. I explore visuals, stories, and ideas of coal mining and natural resource extraction and labor that is repetitive and unseen.

 These interests grew in part from my lived experience and family history. I’m from rural Appalachia, my grandfather was a coal miner - an occupation 5 generations long, traced back to ancestors in South Wales. My grandma worked in a textile factory as a young woman - my family sold mineral rights to a fracking company when I was a teenager. I grew up playing on slag heaps. 

Slate Lines

For my short animation, Slate Lines, I created a stop motion animation by drawing directly onto slate ruins in post-industrial Corris, Wales. For this work, I responded to the landscape by using slate rock to draw onto old structures left behind by the slate mining industry. There was a ritual to this process. I hiked up a mountain each day with my animation gear - the sun and rain became part of the work.

Patch Work

My previous project, Patch Work, is a series of 6 stop motion animation/video works. The materiality of these animation devices was inspired by sewing, drawing, coal mining, and the studio environment: charcoal, coal slag, screws, t-pins, wood, cardboard, and thread. The process of stop motion animation is significant to my concepts: the work is slow, repetitive, and laborious. My hands touch the objects thousands of times in an effort to create movement that looks mechanical and filmic. Through this process, the evidence of my labor is erased.