The world speaks to us through everything she holds, sometimes in whispers, sometimes in screams. I see the way the grass turns brown under the blazing Texas sun, her blades curling inward. I watch how the San Antonio River breathes differently in drought and flood, her moods teaching me about survival and rage. But she also speaks through the old stories, the folk and fairy tales that have warned us for centuries: don't enter the forest at night, don't marry the man who hides his true nature from you.

In this body of work, I've woven sculpture, painting, drawing, and puppetry into a fable of my own making. This is the beginning of Chapter Two: Lion Laughs Last.

Celtic and Norse folklore tell of selkies—captured feminine creatures who slip between seal and human form by shedding or wearing their seal skins. These stories echo with a familiar violence: worldwide, nearly 1 in 3, or 30%, of women have been subjected to physical and/or sexual violence. If these statistics reflected mental and verbal abuse, the numbers would be far higher. They steal our wildness and call it love. In Chapter One, The Woman Under the Water, I transformed this long-standing wound into a new story. A bull—brutal and possessive—steals a snake's skin and hides it from her. But she reclaims what was always hers and flees, finding her freedom in the current.

In Chapter Two, the snake swims upstream and finds a woman crying under a tree…This woman is trapped, caught in the web of an abusive man's making, afraid for herself and her children. The snake sees herself in the crying woman. She whispers to the woman that she is not alone, that escape is possible. The snake's bite awakens what was always sleeping the woman; She becomes a mighty cat, fierce enough to protect what she loves, powerful enough to break free.

As you move through this exhibition, you journey from Chapter One into the beginnings of Chapter Two, following the current of these interconnected stories. In both, women find themselves held by Mother Nature, guided by her, set free by remembering their own strength. Through my work, I seek to remind everyone, especially women, that we are not separate from the natural world's power and wisdom—we are part of her endless capacity for resilience, transformation, and righteous fury.

Bio

Sarah Fox’s multi-media narratives and characters are created from embodied female experience. Stories of life, loss, sex and love are told through archetypical hybrid creatures. The resulting drawings, cyanotypes, and video works suggest a fairytale with an undercurrent of dark symbolism.

Her work has been shown throughout Texas, as well as in the Kinsey Institute (Bloomington, Indiana), Field Projects Gallery (New York, New York), Espacio Dörffi (Lanzarote, Canary Islands), Casa Lu (Mexico City), and Darmstädter Sezession, (Darmstadt, Germany). She has participated in artist residencies throughout the US including The Vermont Studio Center, The Women’s Studio Workshop, Wassiac Projects, and residencies abroad at Casa Lu in Mexico City, Residencia Nautilus in the Canary Islands, Atelierhaus Hilmsen in Hilmsen, Germany and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. She received an Individual Artist Grant from the City of San Antonio in 2021.

Fox lives and works in San Antonio, Texas. She received a BA from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas where she studied studio art and feminist theory. She received an MFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio. In addition to teaching at Texas A&M University, she runs an art and ecology summer camp for young artists in conjunction with the San Antonio River Foundation.