Sarah Maria Conarro

I am an interdisciplinary artist and educator working across painting, collage, installation, and socially engaged practice. Through these forms, I explore how culture—both material and nonmaterial—can nurture vulnerability, authentic connection, and collective memory. I ask: How can art spark meaningful conversation during times of political fracture? How might strangers, for a moment, become a community? What spaces, both material and imagined, allow the nervous system to soften, to trust, to open?

To explore these questions, I work with collage as both a physical technique and conceptual approach to create social engagement and visual arts projects. The act of assembling and arranging objects, text, sound, geometry, ephemeral traces, and human interaction form the tangible elements of my practice, constantly engaging with investigations into non-hierarchy, intuition, scale, spatial thresholds, and the emotional resonance of small, seemingly inconsequential decisions. At its core, my work is a dynamic interplay between material “ingredients” and conceptual “recipes.”  

Equipped with ingredients and recipes, I build systems for social engagement that balance structure and freedom. I design projects with frameworks of rules, prompts, and invitations—skeletal systems strong enough to guide participation, yet porous enough to allow individual agency. Echoing traditions of instructional art, I imagine these works extending beyond my own presence, shaped anew by those who encounter them. 

Facilitating these projects demands attentiveness to the dynamics of power and inclusion. I weave mechanisms that flatten hierarchy, designing encounters where unfamiliarity and shared vulnerability can become common ground. By studying my own comfort and discomfort—what disorients, what soothes—I build spaces that lower barriers to engagement. Yet no framework can anticipate every need; my work remains alive, continuously evolving through observation and the subtle data of lived interaction.

I research how people navigate public spaces—the architectures of rest, the microtextures of casual gathering—while attending closely to my own instincts in similar contexts. This research - both external and internal - requires distilling and this act is the base of my visual practice. 

Parallel to my social practice, my solo visual art deepens these inquiries into vulnerability and transformation. Through painting, drawing, and large-scale installation, I explore how form, color, and material offer new grammars of seeing and feeling. Recurring motifs—light, prisms, mirrors, fire—serve as both mediums and metaphors, embodying cycles of reflection, transformation, and impermanence. Making and unmaking are treated as interconnected acts within my process.

The act of collaging / assembling disparate colors, textures, and languages mirrors my commitment to unlikely communications, emergent collaborations, and unexpected synergies. This sensibility extends beyond the studio into live engagements and participatory events, creating hybrid spaces that blur disciplinary boundaries.

The major throughline through all my work is accessibility. Whether working within or beyond institutional settings, I seek to lower thresholds for entry and open space for broader participation. Often, the question of how to begin a conversation is just as vital as the conversation itself, shaping how I design invitations into the work

Through these interwoven processes, I aim to create spaces where connection, vulnerability, and transformation are not imposed but invited—spaces where carefully designed systems support genuine encounter, and where participants bring the work fully to life.