Sarah Beth Hartman is a multimedia Chicago-based artist working primarily with sound & fiber. She views weaving as a manifestation of music, and music as a form of tapestry. These two arts give her a deeper connection to the dynamics of the natural world in all of its forms. Sarah Hartman employs musical harmony and texture to define her choices of color and material, playing “rhythms” with her stitches. She prefers to weave in silence, connecting to melody, rhythm, & tonal color in her mind while creating with her hands.

The natural sciences have always been at the core if my inspiration as an artist. The various patterns within the organization of life, matter, & experience, from the macro-scale to the microscopic, this is the foundation for my personal creative journey. The intersection between the human experience and the physical world is something that I seek to understand and discover in art. In a compositional sense, music is embedded in everything that surrounds us: language, form, & the structure of the natural world. Like hierarchies in biology, melodies and harmonies can live at different size scales; the movement of harmonics within a single sound, or a single word, can be heard as a melody. I look for “music” in found sounds, synths, language, & stories. Many properties of music & visual art are ubiquitous in nature including motif, rhythm, repetition, random variation, & self-similarity.

There is a threshold that lives between music & noise, form & formless; it is at this point where images & songs can exist as multiple perceivable shapes & melodies at the same time. In creating my work, I process and express the ambiguous, the subconscious, and the expression of emotion within my physical body. These manifest as color, harmony & dynamics within the piece. I go back and forth over periods between weaving music and weaving textile. I lose my entire physical being in the process of it all. In the mixing of color, the equalization of sound, I become the material I am creating and give it a voice through each decision.

The parallel qualities of music and tapestry are fascinating to me. When layering sounds and engineering a mix, the frequencies are the wefts interlocked into a scaffold of time, like a loom of warp strings. I weave together sounds to react to one another, sewing “bolts” within a 3D sonic textile. At its core, music is a physical sculpture. Just as well, the loom can be seen a musical instrument with rhythm, repetition, & motif in each stich, like a bow moving across a violin.

Thank you for visiting my portfolio shop & taking a moment to read about my passions. Please contact me via email (sarahbethhartman.art@gmail.com) for all commissions, collaborations, or to better connect. I so appreciate your time & support!

-Sarah Beth Hartman