rural
Growing up in Wild Cove, a small outport in the White Bay, Sabrina’s earliest memories are of labour.
She watched the men in her community gather in sheds, stages, and boats or they worked together to build houses, their labouring bodies dotting the roofs nestled in the hills. Shared labour was a pillar of her community. While today’s outports in the province are shaped by contemporary economic forces, Sabrina considers the way these community pillars exist in our current time.
As she searches for a way to hold onto remnants of the past in a shifting modern landscape, Sabrina relies on painting’s capacity to relay a memory through colour, atmosphere, and movement. She considers the ways in which a painting is able to linger within a temporal moment, to deepen it with colour, texture, brush work, and movement. In this way, her paintings function as a meeting ground for the expansiveness of memory and experience: joy and grief meets the confines of labour and the limits of socioeconomic situations.
At the core of Sabrina’s practice is a reckoning with the possibility of her community’s dissolution and resettlement and what that would mean for the people she loves, her identity, and her home. rural is an ode to the spirit of Wild Cove while Sabrina’s work is an earnest attempt to challenge the erasure of communities like hers and to work toward a future where our lives can thrive in the places we were always told we had to leave.
