Let us all be from somewhere.

Let us tell each other everything we can.

- Bob Hicok

Click here to view a short slide show of Sarah’s work

I was born a boy, small, tiny even, unknown to the world, unknown to myself. I am much bigger now, my body covered in dark hair, apparently busy and productive in the world: working, speaking, parenting, loving, hating, feeling, thinking.

How did I become this me I am still unsure of? Where did I come from? What is it to be a man? A woman? A boy? A girl? How should I behave? What makes me?

My father was not exactly absent, but he traveled a great deal and therefore was gone much of my youth. I was raised primarily by my mother and my older sister. In relationships I’ve been said to play “the woman’s role,” in friendship be “androgynous,” in behavior and motion “fluid” and “feminine.”

What did my childhood produce by learning the world through female eyes and emotions? Thoughts? Never a boy of many friends – where did I tumble and wrestle and fight without a brother?

Sarah was a girl among boys. Learning her body in the rough tangle of play. What to speak, how to say, voice of culture, voices of mother / father, the jangle of classmates and the yelps of boys, brothers.

I suspect an infant forms identity, as we always do, by what we are not. Tables and chairs and toys. Things we bump into, hide under, grasp and break or lose.

“Home” is this conglomeration, this sometimes upside-down world of objects and persons we are defined by, with, against. The smell of the space between, the sweat of boys, the kitchen, bathroom, sounds of shouts and tears, wooden floors.

This is the light we live by. Turning it this way and that, reassembling, amassing what becomes us. I am this, not this (my hand burning on the stove). I am this, not this (my body pinched and panicked in the fray of struggle). This, not this (speaking quietly or harshly to my doll, mounting the helmet on my head, wielding the sword).

Now there are streets and strangers, intimates and friends. Societies, armies, universes, ideas. I am this, not this (append an object). This, not this (don a mask).

Sarah Kephart has created great work of detail and mass. The subtle lines of our individuated personalities and the gigantic weights of our pasts. It is the light we see by, the burden we bend under or dispossess. Where we come from…who we are.

I am full of lies and truth and mute angry realities. The fragility of graphite, the gravity of oak and gluey white latex. The crush and flight of families, the subtle enormity of persons.

For more information about the artist, please see her website, at www.sarahkephart.com.



Nathan Filbert 3/5/2010