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Biography

Sarah Nance is an interdisciplinary artist working across fiber, performance, drawing, and installation. Her research draws on archived and speculative landscapes to explore how geologic time can be sensed, translated, and embodied. 

Nance’s current research considers the mirage as a phenomenon that erodes familiar perceptions of place. A mirage’s refractive, watery surface disorients by visually layering distinct geologic epochs and biomes: a desert momentarily contains an inland sea, as if recalling its distant past or projecting a possible future. This flash of perceptual instability undermines presumptions of landscape as a fixed, legible resource, highlighting instead the land’s own agency and the contingency of its boundaries. In the studio, Nance works with beads, sequins, Mylar, and other reflective materials to produce visually shifting surfaces that similarly disrupt the clarity and permanence of the line.

In her site-responsive work, she creates shrouds for archived landscapes—environments, such as former inland seas, now knowable only through fossil layers, artifacts, or recorded data. The shrouds take the form of hand-worked geotextiles, vocal performances, walked drawings, and other surface layers that trace deep time within the landscape. 

Prior to joining the faculty at 91����, Nance held faculty positions in Interdisciplinary Art at SMU (Dallas, TX), Fibres & Material Practices at Concordia University (Montréal, QC), and Fiber at Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA). Her work has been performed and exhibited widely, in venues across Canada, China, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, and South Korea, as well as throughout the U.S.

Projects

• “Mirage and Disorientation.” Ways of Seeing the Living World. Issue No. 0. . 2026.
• . Galerie Octave Cowbell. 2025.
• Handwerker Rotunda Gallery. 2025. 
• Clarke Forum lecture series, Dickinson College. 2025.
• The Conversation. 19 Jan., 2024.

Education

• MFA, University of Oregon
• BA, Luther College

Research Profile

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