The morning I got back, I stepped from the plane to a quality of light already in my body, to air clear and striking, almost warm, the sun gentle yet shining my face. I looked up in a kind of prayer as I walked onto the tarmac. In this moment I was home.
Home sky, the kind that remembers you.
A piece of sky shouldn’t have that clarity, a delineation, somehow bordered. But it does. Without tangible borders, yet the sky remains known. It’s a home, sky, the air in your bones.
The beauty of this is how the sky moves even as it knows you, as it claims you, movement caught in the very feeling of home. Under the sky that is yours, the sky moves. Seen this way the idea of place is a little illusory, the very land slipping away at the same time as we are basking in ‘our’ sky. It is right to say we are at once at home and not at home. It is right to say that this is not always easy, not always hard.
The work of Sara Badr Schmidt deals directly with the intimate experience of dislocation, of changing place, of place changing us.
She describes her work as an attempt to “explain or at least try to make people feel what it means emotionally to have fear inscribed in one’s DNA to be constantly torn away from one’s environment, one’s friends, one’s home and finally not knowing where you belong while trying to be accepted.”
And yet, the answer to this question remains opaque. How does it feel to be torn, not accepted, unknown. Is this really the question. Or is the question what comes after.
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For Sara, the quest for home is deeply personal, psychological, almost feral. Division seems rooted in her psyche. And yet in her insistent digging into the past, her work provides a document from the future, a reminder of the totality of such experience, the continuing effect of exile, at many scales and for many reasons, on the individual at every strata of their existence.
In a sense it is human attachment to land that she wishes to dispel. While the gap and split of her own exile is central, it is also clear that she considers this experience of movement to be useful, marking an ability to shift, chameleon-like, between one place, context, and another. The defining quality of her experience is the attempt to move in the face of human expectations, of social life.
Returning insistently to the psychological and physical borders that shutter and delineate human experience, she describes the specific experience of exile as intimately connected with this broader anthropology, noting:
You need to have them under your skin,
these problems born of tensions,
you need to have smelled the smell of death,
heard the sound of war
to understand
that there is nothing to understand,
that man will always have borders in his heart and in his soul as long as they exist on earth.
But having established the significance and particularity of exile as a concept, she moves. Look at the snails. Small creatures, rendered in clay and bronze, formed in various states, some without shells at all, bodies soft and vulnerable, shell discarded nearby. It is a nudge to a possible future state, a symbol for home on the move.
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Conflict lies at the root of the work, an attempt for a way to see differently, to reach in and twist hard-felt beliefs, and to pull them out by the root, finding out in the process if they will grow anywhere else.
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There is not a photo, but there is a girl who draws, or has drawn. Charcoal on wood is elemental, could be rubbed away. It is scrap, ephemeral. Perhaps the artist drew as an adult, but the feel is young, fast and direct, a reminder of younger selves.
Here is a drawing from memory. a remembered place, a remembered event that we do not know. All we know is that it has become solid, it remains somehow, now here.
We left home, each of these images is titled.
These diminutive and ephemeral drawings from ‘then’ are connected to an adult world by the medium of luxurious rugs created ‘now’. The rugs are silk, cashmere, wool. We are told they are knotted by hand. They have the same titles as their anchors; we left home, repeated again and again.
In the gallery the rugs are on the wall. A drawing alongside of each, we assume they came first, the initial spark now re-transcribed as rug, and we feel the soft weight of feet pressing. The lightness of the charcoal sketch, drawn on a wooden ground, in sharp contrast to the rug’s weight. To weave is to inhabit tension, the tension of textile growing under the weaver’s fingers. In the process of weaving the maker becomes part of the making, an embodied understanding of the time and space taken by the process, a soft weight anchored by domestic echoes. The effect is idiosyncratic, odd, the transience of the sketch reaching at an appropriate weight in its transposition to rug. The gap between sketch and rug is the experience of dislocation.
A rug is home, the particularity of textile, the texture of familiarity underfoot. It is a memory of where you walk.
And then, I think, a rug is also moveable.
There is, at once, the moment of imprinting, the continual afterlives of dislocation, the continual state of being in exile, and then there is the possibility of movement, lightness, of homing rather than home.
For Sara, the problem here is less the experience of dislocation, rather it is the social implication of being the outsider.
She tells me, have you heard this, I can’t remember where it is from “A bird in a cage thinks flying is an illness.”
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A series of texts are inscribed on concrete tablets, personal stories from childhood, engraved on a material known for durability, strength, humility.
These texts speak clearly to separation and return, highlighting the impossibility of the latter.
They chart the becoming of foreignness, of becoming an outsider. Heavier than textile, these stories are the heaviest.
What if these words were written on feathers, easy to lose among each other and the wind. I sense this possibility, underneath the concrete.
Ask, what divides humans daily. She will say, it is the experience of exile, outsideness, at any scale. It is the experience of being cast out that creates division between people.
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Look to the sky, a world larger than human.
Borderless, a series of photographs comprising backgrounds of sky superimposed with small texts. Words of many languages placed on many skies;
I have a dream, Arrabbiata
Lagom, Borderless
We can only imagine the precise location of each piece of sky, the languages might provide a clue but then, they might not. The borderless skies can speak many languages.
Memory is akin to sky, the edges felt, embodied, the borders arranged from the inside. You are your memories; they know you before you do. Home sky, yours and also always changing. A perfect paradox.
In the work of Badr Schmidt there is a continuing, a becoming, a gradual unfolding of impossibility explored through memory. At the same time there is a limitless quality in the lightness, the world, that could be possible, if thinking could be this light, this flexible.
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A large oil painting dominates one wall of the gallery. It is titled, Cherry tree, “the cherry tree always accompanies me”, she says. A luxurious rug lies at its feet, The cherry tree flowers. It is more than a shadow.
One more riddle, another impossible question:
what lies underneath and is more than a shadow.