Sara Dittrich

About the Artist

Sara Dittrich (b. Cincinnati, Ohio 1991) is an interdisciplinary sculpture artist who builds introspective experiences that shift perspective from passive seeing to active looking, from passive hearing to active listening. She uses musical thinking to illuminate the dynamic and unconscious rhythms of the body and environments with diverse mediums that often include sculptural objects, musical performance, video, and interactive electronic technologies. Her art is heard and felt in real time, a feature that Nat Trotman, Curator of Performance and Media at the Guggenheim, called “the liveness” of Dittrich’s work. Dittrich’s studio practice is located in Baltimore, Maryland where she has lived and worked since receiving her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Dittrich’s work has been exhibited and performed with numerous venues including the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH; and DiverseWorks, Houston, TX. She studied under Dominik Lang at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in 2013. She has also been awarded artist residencies including Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (2015); the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship (2015); and Sculpture Space (2015). In 2018-2019, she was a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. She is the recipient of a 2017 Mary Sawyers Baker Artist Award, and was a 2017 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize Finalist.

Artist's Statement

I’ve placed a cellist in a 9ft. tall chair, sculpted hundreds of tiny ears from clay, and performed with bio sensors that match breath to tidal movement. My mediums include everything from sculptural objects, printmaking, video, and interactive electronic technologies. The focus of my artistic practice lies in making the viewer conscious of the unconscious bodily rhythms of everyday life—breathing, walking, beating. In my most recent works I seek to compare rhythms of the human body with rhythms in the landscape, as a method to consider—and place within personal, felt experience—human relationship with the changing climate. I encourage the audience to slow down, engage in sensory perception, and find poetic refuge in moments of crisis. These multi-sensory experiences use the body’s circulatory system as a means of fielding questions about close listening and ecological healing. Through my works I invite viewers to consider the authority of their own somatic experience. Devices such as repetition, liveness, and collaboration filter in the physical rhythms and movements of the body created by the accumulation of footsteps, breaths, and heartbeats. These tools place the viewer in the here and now, creating spaces to just be.