Chloe Sailor
College of Fine Arts Studio Art (MFA)
and it was the nicest home she ever lived in
I am an artist originally from Maine and am currently a third year MFA Candidate in Studio Art at Florida State University. I previously received an MEd in Education and a BA in Studio Art with a focus in painting from the University of New Hampshire. I have exhibited nationally with recent shows including group exhibitions at Zilberman Gallery (Miami), Swan Coach House Gallery (Atlanta), and Art Center Sarasota (Sarasota, FL), with an upcoming two-person exhibition at 621 Gallery (Tallahassee). I collect threads of memories found in archives of my maternal ancestors who have called Maine home for generations and use Critical Fabulation to repair them, darning them with fiction and thread. My interdisciplinary approach combines painting, fiber arts, photography, writing, and archival research to explore memory, materiality, and absence.
By creating paintings using alternative photographic processes, historic quilt patterns, and secondhand Maine textiles, I create a dialogue between women’s history, craft tradition, and contemporary storytelling. Each painting uses a combination of watercolor, ink, gouache, and cyanotype. The cyanotype is often used as paint, applied alongside the paints and then imprinted with photograms of familial objects or digital negatives of archival or personal images. Once dry, I develop it in water, which in turn washes away part of the painting itself. This process both reveals and destroys, a notion that references the delicate nature of memory and archive. Maternal histories and knowledge are difficult to find in archival materials, and when they are found, they are commonly recorded by men. Much of this history is an oral one, passed down between generations but forgotten over time. This practice restores some of these histories by weaving together a new narrative of Maine history.
Artwork Description:
In this series, I explore the invisible maternal histories, starting with my grandmother, Nancy Rollins Harris, whose life of constant movement raises questions about how place shapes identity and memory. I construct these scenes using paint and cyanotype and then expose and rinse it. This process darkens the cyanotype and washes away parts of the paint, referencing the duality of memory. Repairs are made, some visible, others invisible. Combining images from personal exploration of places that she experienced, I construct a reality that is closer to the truth than life itself.