about me
Bio
Sarah Loomis is an interdisciplinary, visual artist working in small-scale paintings, drawings, mixed media shadow boxes, and installations to explore concepts of wounds and healing. Through the depiction of trees and human form, her work addresses issues of the delicacy of life and memory, injustice and devastation, and how these themes can exist both personally and collectively. Often with an environmental message about the massive devastation of landscapes or a commentary on societal issues, such as divorce or abuse, much of her pieces are deeply personal and based on her own life story. Loomis’ work has been exhibited in various shows around the San Francisco Bay Area and the Pacific Northwest. A longtime resident of San Francisco, Loomis received a BFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. She has also studied at Parson’s School of Design in Paris and the Pont-Aven School of Art in Brittany, France. Additionally, she has interned at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA and is a regular volunteer for the non-profit arts organization, Southern Exposure. Presently, Loomis is a candidate for a MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Full Bio
Sarah Loomis is an interdisciplinary, visual artist working in small-scale paintings, drawings, mixed media shadow boxes, and installations to explore concepts of wounds and healing. Born north of Seattle in a small town near the Cascade Mountains, Loomis’ beginnings as an artist started at an early age. She grew up in a large, broken family, with a single mother, and created art as a way to cope with challenges she faced as a child. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, surrounded by beautiful nature, trees were a significant influence in Loomis’ life. Many times she witnessed entire forests cut down (also known as “clearcuts”) to build track-housing neighborhoods for the rapidly growing population of the Seattle area. Some of these forests were places she had known her whole life and considered sacred to her. Even after moving to the Bay Area, many of these meaningful childhood memories and early hardships have helped inform her art process and current body of work.
Loomis works in fragile mediums, in hand-size form. Whether she is suturing torn photographs or assembling tiny pieces of wood and text into finger size bottles, she takes these miniature pieces and creates larger installations that fill entire spaces. Sometimes discovered in nature, at flea markets, or even randomly on the street, resources she uses for her work are often found, recycled, and discarded. Using materials that already have their own past and now thrown away or considered useless, she takes these objects and creates a new story from them. Through the depiction of trees and human form, Loomis’ work addresses issues of the delicacy of life and memory, injustice and devastation, and how these themes can exist both personally and collectively. Often with an environmental message about the massive devastation of landscapes or a commentary on societal issues, such as divorce or abuse, much of her work is deeply personal and based on her own life story.
Loomis has shown her work in various shows around the San Francisco Bay Area and the Pacific Northwest. Recent exhibitions include Telling Stories Through Art (Diablo Valley College, Concord, CA), Offerings: Works of Text and Image (Village Art Theater Gallery, Danville, CA), Artfully Reclaimed V (Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Novato, CA), and Renewable Energy Juried Art Show (Clymer Museum of Art, Ellensburg, WA), in which she won the Award for Conceptual Merit. She was also featured on Integral Education: The CIIS Blog, with her post, Art as a Tool of Transformation.
A longtime resident of San Francisco, Loomis received a BFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. She has also studied at Parson’s School of Design in Paris and the Pont-Aven School of Art in Brittany, France. Additionally, she has interned at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA and is a regular volunteer for the non-profit arts organization, Southern Exposure. Presently, Loomis is a candidate for a MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at the California Institute of Integral Studies.