Sarah Rocheleau Artist's Statement

I am a painter, sculpture, and illustrator. I juxtapose art and science with the resulting dichotomy causing the viewer to think about the seemingly conflicting ideas and the resulting possibilities that may ensue.

I use the imagery and art forms of the Victorian era in an ironic manner to discuss concepts of dominance and control that the time period has become synonymous with. There is something both extraordinarily arrogant and profoundly ambitious about an art form that seeks to encapsulate all of nature in complete artificiality.

If one considers though how intently the Victorians worked to bring some semblance of order to chaos of the natural world, one can not fail to notice the large debt we owe to them for the clarity we inherited from their efforts. Without them we would not have the classification systems we come to rely on, evolutionary theory that informed us of our position in the chain of being or even the technology of the camera that allowed us to in some small measure reproduce the experience of seeing.