Regarding Sara Sato: Notes from the Sea
Sara Sato: Notes from the Sea (2025)
Polk County Heritage Gallery
by Michaela Mullin
I have no interest in making a work that doesn’t elicit a feeling. - Kara Walker
Every change is a form of liberation. - Paula Rego
Sara Sato is concerned with sacred spaces and boundaries, both internal and external. She is interested in objects washed ashore, which carry both spatial and temporal symbolism. And she investigates humans, nature, and the relationship between them. Sato paints the world as both real and imagined, her thoughtful choice of media–watercolor and sumi ink–also engaging the relationship of land elements to water. This is a literal exploration of the metaphorical blurring of boundaries, implying there may be no clear answer as to which is which.
When Sato arrived in Iowa, she noticed grass pushing up through cracks in the concrete, and it reminded her of home in Japan. This kind of conjoining– of physical reality, of mind and memory, and the imaginary– this is what Sato processes and wrangles in the meditative exhibit, Notes from the Sea.
Six sketches begin the show, mapping and envisioning (sea) life. The sketches give us a glimpse of how Sato draws distinction and ambiguity about the above and below of any horizon, how sea surface may make a ceiling of a many-winged home. These six small works introduce Sato’s subjects, compositional thinking (decompositional also), and color palette; and with the mural-scale canvas, “May Day,” at the back of the gallery, they meaningfully operate as shorelines for the exhibit, allowing the branches of narrative to dive and float between them.
Sato says that “May Day” was ‘born of [her] struggles with of youth’:
Painting the physical and emotional walls and trenches of growth and trauma
aids me in the exploration of how we become and change to be what we are.
My concerns regarding gender, sexuality, and identity in my paintings sprout
from my own biracial, and multicultural upbringing.
The monkey bars, with its joints, in “May Day” visually echoes throughout the exhibit in the form of skeletal figures. It is more opaque than the other paintings, with acrylic paint used in its making, but it serves as a study of how different planar levels and objects overlap, skewer, and coexist: tree, koi fish, metal, iris. Sato’s straight perspectival lines amidst the panoply give a solidity to the work that rests a startled eye into an acceptance of the mingling.
Notes from the Sea is thoughtfully curated, giving visitors sizable creatures and events with moments of soft underwater waves, allowing connections that offer phantoms and fathoms and black and blue blood-like wounds, which below the surface are different configurations than above, where visibility purportedly reigns.
Sato says:
I want my pieces to echo human experience: joy, suffering, points of calm at
which we all find refuge … To me, painting is a process of recollection and
repression. Within the pictorial spaces are the interpretation of the Eastern art
through Western means of abstraction and fragmentation…
She excels at this, giving shape to the psychological and spiritual through the personal, mythologic, and folkloric. For ‘the ambiguous, and often unnerving tone and narrative qualities,’ Sato credits influences such as artists Kara Walker and Paula Rego, the latter who is known for her storybook and nursery-rhyme-based artworks and focus on women’s rights. Three of the larger works clearly fall into these referential categories: “Giant Abalone” was inspired by Japanese folklore about the titular creature that causes storms in the sea; “World Whale” is a beautiful whale sighting in the show, inspired by the story of a whale who fools others with what appears to be an island on its back, but is actually a monster (in Sato’s painting, she has placed the monster/island inside the head to mimic a brain).
The third, “Feejee Mermaid,” combines a Japanese mermaid legend, about a nun who lived to be 800 years old because she had eaten the meat of a mermaid and the story of the ‘mermaid mummy’ from 19th-century Japan. In this painting, Sato also uses gansai, traditional Japanese watercolors.
Other traditional Japanese elements are introduced, but always with her contemporary influence and experience. Sato’s small pieces, “Creatures of the Ocean Floor II” incorporates Japanese origami, and “Sea Witch” and “Sea Star,” contain calligraphic elements along borders and within white space, negating the very idea of negative space. The sumi ink drawings, “Whale,” and “The Sea Witch,” are black and white only, inducing stark contrast for the viewer, a clearly articulated pause, in an ever-changing duration.
The works in the “Kelp” series hang intermittently throughout the exhibit, placed in a manner reminiscent of grass popping up through sidewalk cracks. Spare, seemingly random, demanding attention despite their quiet presentation, they, like other smaller works, inhabit the central gallery. They portray calmer movements–a sampling of a larger, violent sea, which holds the living and the dead, the natural and manmade, reiterating to the viewers that the water and land share crusts.
Amidst the struggles of many tales of animal (humans included) life and the sea, “Deep Blue” may be the most tender of all the works which portray human remains. The skeleton is small in stature, squatting, making it both a figure which appears curious and feels vulnerable (curiosity and vulnerability often cohabitate). The bones have accumulated a body of stars, baby sea anemones or marine snow. Skull down, it appears to be convening with something outside and below the edge of the painting … with what, we can certainly imagine.