Objects for Collective Inquiry: Sara Alsum-Wassenaar presents art exhibit at Dordt College

Sara Alsum-Wassenaar, artist. Top photograph is a gallery installation and above is a Salad Foraging Bowl (detail) being used in the process of gathering a weed salad.

Traditionally, the newest member of Dordt’s art faculty is invited to have a solo exhibition.  As a result the community is invited to attend the solo art exhibition by Sara Alsum-Wassenaar, assistant professor of art at Dordt College. The show is on display in the college’s Campus Center Art Gallery until February 1.

Alsum-Wassenaar has created an exhibit that showcases how “built and natural environments interrupt one another, the spaces where human intervention interacts with creation.” Her artwork includes objects such as sewing, ceramics, and bike building, to name a few.

“The work explores basic human needs and fulfills them within a regional environment through a process of labor,” says Alsum-Wassenaar. “They invite foraging and object making, reveal relationships between bodies and land, and compress the space between humans and their habitat by using a mediated form, like clay or a bicycle. Through this mediation the handmade landscape is domesticated.” In a statement about her show Alsum-Wassenaar writes the following:

These objects cultivate alternative modes of occupying spaces where the built and natural environment interrupt one another, the spaces where human intervention interacts with creation. These objects facilitate a relationship between the handmade and the land by utilizing traditional craft methods including metalworking, pottery, woodworking, and sewing -processes that can be produced on an individual level. Objects are designed, made or hybridized on an individual scale in response to specific land-use requirements. The work explores basic human needs and fulfills them within a regional environment through a process of labor. They invite foraging and object making, reveal relationships between bodies and land, and compress the space between humans and their habitat by using a mediated form, like clay or a bicycle. Through this mediation the handmade landscape is domesticated.

Alsum-Wassenaar has a B.S. in psychology and art from Hope College, an M.Ed. in secondary education from Grand Valley State University, and an M.F.A. in new media from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.