Sarah M. Rodriguez

Sarah M. Rodriguez’s aluminum sculptures are made of individual casts of organic materials like branches, seed pods, bones, and shells. The organic materials are sourced from her hikes around her studio in Ojo Caliente, New Mexico. She also uses organic material sent to her by her family in Hawai’i. She says, "Half of my family is Native Hawaiian (Ka naka Maoli) and the other half were European settlers who moved to Texas.” Her currently family lives in Hawai’i, right in between one of the oldest ranches in the US, H and Mauna Kea, a colonial and ancestral site.  Many of the forms of her works are inspired by these landscapes. 

Many of Rodriguez's  sculptures, include casts of animal bones, which are commonly found both in both the New Mexico and Hawaii landscape. Both places are the site of a lot of cattle ranching. Rodriguez says, "I'm committed to the experience of art as nonverbal, as an exercise in knowing that the current order of things is not necessary or preordained. We are always becoming done and redone.”

After casting, Rodriguez  welds and machine-cuts the individual components to create an overall, balanced form. For her the forms emerge intuitively. Both the weld-joints and machine-cuts are visible in the final forms of the sculptures. During the casting process, Rodriguez doesn't try to fully control the aluminum--as an animal trainer, she says, “just because we can train an animal to do something, doesn’t mean we should.” 

"Living in places with asymmetrical relations of power takes negotiation. So I’ve always tried to work by addition and subtraction. Addition suggests assemblage, a formal strategy I try to make use of.” Although the original organic materials are destroyed during the casting process, the resulting aluminum sculpture is, in the end, the only proof of their existence. These aluminum sculptures don't just memorialize these individual objects: they echo the symbiotic forms of a mutable landscape.