Biography
Sara Wentworth is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, designer, violist, synthesist, and engineer based in Brooklyn, NY. She grounds her work in a collage aesthetic, using technology to glue together disparate elements. Wentworth draws from modularity, minimalism, and indeterminacy to blend the old with the new, analog with digital, image with sound, and sound with space. Collaboration and improvisation are central to her creative process, forming richly textured, layered pieces that range from simple and melodic to noisy and chaotic. Wentworth holds a PhD in Digital Arts and Humanities from The School of Music and Theater at University College Cork, Ireland, and has an extensive background performing solo and collaboratively on an international scale.
Artistic Statement
I create interdisciplinary works including multimedia installations, interactive audio-visual environments for live music and dance performances, and music compositions for myself and others.
My artistic practice is deeply influenced by collage aesthetic, theory, and methods. I find joy in juxtaposing, re-contextualizing, and reverse-engineering technology and subject matter to evoke new narratives, sounds, and imagery. Rather than glue, I use technology to unite disparate elements and mediums. I draw on modularity, minimalism, and indeterminacy to blend the old with the new, analog with digital, image with sound, and sound with space. I fragment, isolate, and reconstruct my material to detach it from its original context. I embrace controlled chaos as a creative practice to extract new ideas, thought processes, and creation methods, curating resonant results into a final piece. I believe these methods can destabilize unexamined ideas, highlight synchronicities and absurdities, and evoke both harmony and dissonance.
Collaboration and improvisation are vital to my creative process. Cross-disciplinary collaboration significantly informs my methodology, allowing me to draw from a wide range of ideas and techniques. I value improvisation as a way to establish dialogue with collaborators and to generate ideas as a solo artist.
My work aims to be dialectic rather than didactic, as I believe that more truth can be found in a discourse than in a conclusion. I don’t explicitly tell my audience what to think or feel, but instead create what Umberto Eco termed an “Open Work,” allowing for interpretation by performers and the audience. Collage, collaboration, and improvisation are key to maintaining this open and dialectic approach.
I believe art helps us understand ourselves and the world, fostering inner peace, empathy, and connection to communities. Through my work, I seek truth, meaning, and connection. Often inspired by science, philosophy, psychology, and mythology, my work is driven by a desire to analyze and understand human needs, motivations, and behaviors. Ultimately, I hope to contribute to a world where we can better live in harmony with ourselves and others within the vast, living, chaotic collage we call humanity on Earth.