Sarah Beth Hartman is a multimedia Chicago-based artist working with sound, fiber, & mixed media on paper. She views weaving as a manifestation of music, and music as a form of tapestry. Sarah sees her expression in fiber as a parallel process to composing music & engineering a mix; these two arts give her a deeper connection & insight to one another. While the themes of her work often root from the sciences, Sarah Hartman employs musical harmony and texture to define her choices of color and material, playing “rhythms” with her stitches. She prefers to weave in silence, connecting to melody, rhythm, & tonal color in her mind while creating with her hands.

“The sciences have always been at the core if my inspiration as an artist. The various patterns within the organization of life, matter, & experience, from the macro-scale to the microscopic-this is the foundation for my personal creative journey. The intersection between the human experience and the physical world is something that I seek to understand and discover in art. In a compositional sense, music is embedded in everything that surrounds us — language, form, & the structure of the natural world. Like hierarchies in biology, melodies and harmonies can live at different size scales—the movement of harmonics within a single sound, or a single word, can be heard as a melody. I look for “music” in found sounds, synths, language, & stories. Many properties of music & visual art are ubiquitous in nature—motif, rhythm, repetition, random variation, & self-similarity. There is a threshold that lives between music & noise, form & formless; it is at this point where images & songs can exist as multiple perceivable shapes & melodies at the same time. Finding this stage of pluripotency directs my compositions.

I go back and forth daily between weaving music and weaving textile. Layering sounds and engineering a mix is like building a sonic tapestry—frequencies are the wefts interlocked into a scaffold of time, like a loom of warp strings. I try to weave together sounds so they react to one another, sewing “bolts” within a 3D sonic textile. At its core, music is a physical sculpture. Just as well, the loom can be seen a musical instrument—there is rhythm, repetition, & motif in stitches, that can be “played” with expression.

Thank you for visiting my shop/portfolio & taking a moment to read about my passions. Please contact me via email (sarahbethhartman.art@gmail.com) for all commissions, collaborations, etc.. I appreciate your time & support!

-Sarah Beth