Silkscreen on vintage autoclave, windows w/ steel, brass, rubber hardware, text by Michael Joseph, 5.25 x 10 x 2.5 inches. Edition of 2. $2000
approx. 2,500 disks of paper hand-punched from several volumes of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, by Edward Gibbons, mounted on an industrial cast iron object, and bound through the center with a brass cylinder. Inside the brass cylinder is a 9 inch glass tube filled with dirt to represent what has been buried, lost or decayed. 5.5 x 15.5 x 5 inches, unique. $1,200.
artist book, glass version: fused glass cover, key chain binding, edition of 10 plus one Artist proof, 8 x 4.75 inches, artist proof. $500
Failing to Act, 2016
Artist book, 6 pages each encased in a folded piece of old accounting paper, wool cover with silk title label, 4.75 x 8 inches, edition of 8. $500
Artist’s book, 16 pages, pamphlet bound, with text from Plotinus’s classic treatise “On the Beautiful” and collage from predominatly 19th & 18th Century sources with ink, pencil, and watercolor on handmade paper. The cover is made from Cave two-sided handmade paper with applied letterpress-printed text from Plotinus and a fragment of a 19th Century engraving, 7 x 5.25 inches, unique. $500
Collage on glass, ink and watercolor on fragments of 19th Century imagery and text, in an early 20th Century wooden box. Unique, 12 pages, 5.6 x 4.4 x 4 inches. $800
Collage on five found pages floated in a shallow wood framed shadow box, 30.5 x 15.50 inches, $1950
Artist’s book, 208 pages, Letterpress, ink and flash on handmade linen and cotton paper from Dieu Donné Papermill
5.25 x 8.5 inches. $600
Statement
My work usually begins as a dialogue with something that already exists: pages taken from old books, stained papers from other eras; or, in the case of my sculptures, found objects. I find blank white paper to be quite blank; I prefer to have something to respond to. My work often has a deliberate tension between and considered abstract elements and personal, or conflicting psychological elements. In addition, I enjoy playing with pedagogical formats, instructions, tools, charts and diagrams, where the object or image’s implied function is immediately subverted by the context of its presentation.
Biography
Sarah Stengle makes sculptures, works on paper and artists’ books. Her works on paper often include images, or pages taken from old encyclopedias or engineering books arranged in orderly compositions. Recently she has turned to working with watercolor and pencil directly over found imagery, text or book pages. She has recently published a definitive manual on producing art historically correct Coffee Rings, and is currently producing Useless Tools, a series of sculptural objects purporting to be apotropaic hand tools, along with a corresponding artist’s book which addresses their proper use in depth. She is part of the Glass Book Project, founded by Nick Kline of Rutgers University and Helga Luest of Witness Justice, in Washington DC. The project address difficult subjects, such as self inflicted injury or the aftermath of domestic violence through the medium of glass books. She is teaching Glass Books at Rutgers Newark, NJ campus.
Ms. Stengle lives in Princeton, New Jersey and maintains a studio nearby in Trenton. She studied metal-smithing at Carnegie-Mellon University, and got her MFA in at the School of visual arts in 1988 in sculpture. She has exhibited regularly and her work is included in the collections of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Pierpont Morgan Library among others.
