Lili Steffen Chats With Sarah Courville

If there’s any word to describe Sarah Courville’s relationship with her craft, it’s serendipitous. Amidst dealing with burnout and an unaccommodating university, Courville felt lucky to end up taking German her first semester of college. Fate played its hand, and studying the language brought her all the way to Germany. While figuring out how to keep herself busy during her first bleak winter here, collages burst forth from her without warning. Spurred by her gravitation towards old literature found in Berlin’s thrift stores and Zu Verschenken recycling culture [people often leave or “gift/give away” unwanted items in cardboard boxes set out on the street], collaging quickly became Courville’s main Beschäftigung [artistic pursuit].

Courville sees collaging as a natural development of her creativity, the medium being an effective outlet to express both internal and external conflicts of being. Her art is an act of organizing, making sense of and becoming familiar with her own (sick) body and the environment around her. Working from an organically-collected repository of fragmented cut-outs, her source material ranges from vintage German Playboys and pre-FKK books about the body [Freikörperkultur, or free body culture, is a nudist movement in Germany], to 1920s exercise booklets and 1970s health magazines. Teeming with jarring and often unsettling juxtapositions of images, words, and textures, Courville’s pieces are vibrant, saturated landscapes. Her surrealistic vignettes depict a witty interplay of language and image, pairing poignantly selected phrases with in-your-face visuals of architecture, retro-technology, disembodied flesh, and everyday consumer products.

To learn more about how Courville goes about synthesizing word with image, I sat down with her in our neighborhood park this August — we happen to live across the street from each other — and had a lovely chat about her craft.

Lili Steffen: Tell me a little bit about your journey into making art.

Sarah Courville: I actually didn’t start working in visual art until maybe three years ago. Before that, I was in a creative writing program at a magnet art school in South Carolina. I was mainly writing short fiction and poetry, but by the time I got to my senior year, I was like ‘Ok, I’m really burned out and I don’t think I can do something with art in university.’ So I got a scholarship to Barnard and did Urban Studies and Public Health. It was miserable, the university was extremely bad at accommodating me, and I had a really hard time there. For the first time I really understood what performative politics is really like, because they claim to really stand up for all different kinds of abilities, but I found that to be entirely false.

So it was fortunate I started taking German classes my first semester. I really liked it, the department was quite good, and they gave me a scholarship to come to Berlin for the summer and study the language. I enjoyed living there, so I applied for a full year abroad at the Freie Universität. New York was making me so sick, and the university was making me miserable. When I got into the program in Berlin, I was like, “Cool, I’m gonna go do that.”

LS: So it was in Berlin that you first developed the medium you work with now?

SC: During my first winter in Berlin, I was quite depressed because I wasn’t anticipating the sun setting at 4pm every day. I had to figure out how to stay inside and entertain myself. I’ve always liked old books and magazines, so I started going to flea markets and second hand bookstores where I found so much material. I would smoke a lot — weed is very entangled in my practice — and at some point I looked at all the books I had and eventually just started tearing things up and cutting things out.

So it was honestly serendipitous how I got into art. When I came to Berlin, it sort of exploded out of me and I felt like the city was feeding my desire. I would start noticing boxes on the street with old magazines or books and for a while, I didn’t pay for any of the materials. There was not really a reason for me to do this, except to keep myself busy and organize my very disordered feelings and thoughts during winter. I was burnt out and having to internalize all these fucked up feelings from going to a university that claimed to support me, but did not in any way, so I didn’t have the energy or inspiration besides pain to do much of anything. That’s how I figured out that collaging is a good outlet for me to channel my creativity — I really felt like I could translate my thoughts into this medium. Now it’s one of the main things that takes up my day and my life. It’s a way to organize external and internal stress and whatever the fuck is going on in the world right now. It’s a way to channel that anxiety into something.

LS: What does your process look like when you sit down to start on a piece? Do you have an idea already formulated or do you first look at the material you have?

SC: Usually it’s a very chaotic process and I embrace the chaos of it. Being stoned plays a big role, because it helps part of my pain to go away so I can focus my creative brain. When I first collect new material, whether it’s from a bookstore or off the street, I go through it and cut out the pages, images, textures, or words that are interesting to me. I then put these away, and maybe I won’t revisit them for a while, but I become familiar with the images I have. Because I’ve cut out and collected so much over the years, it’s basically like reaching into a bag and pulling out something. It’s best when I have infinite possibilities of images around me — I’ll grab a handful of something that looks interesting and play around with the composition for hours.

LS: Since your art has so much word interplay in it, would you see collaging as a continuation of your background in creative writing?

SC: Yeah, I definitely have seen a continuation. I mostly wrote either surrealist poetry or short, realistic fiction, which most of the time reflected some kind of internal suffering, especially as a teenager. It seems like those two things collided and exploded out of me in images. And I think collaging is a lot like poetry, because you’re taking words that already exist and combining them. My art is very autobiographical, but in some ways it’s influenced by random events and finding different images that collide to make sense. I think it’s a nice growth, because I’m basically not writing anymore, but collaging has filled the space and grown bigger than it.

LS: Branching off of that, are there any concrete places you draw inspiration from besides looking at the material you collected? Do you have particular artists that you go to?

SC: The process itself kind of creates the art, and it feels like the images beg for me to do a certain thing. Obviously my chronic illness and my disability influences that a lot, because it’s like making sense of my body. Part of my disability is illusory, since severe chronic migraines can manifest visually. A lot of people with headache disorders experience visual trailing or double vision. It doesn’t happen to me every time, less now that I’m on this injection medication, but still frequently. If I wake up sick — this is the only way I’ve been able to describe it — it’s like being on a nonconsensual psychedelic trip paired with lots of nausea.

So these different visual effects that happen to me while I’m ill, which manifest very negatively in my body, influence my work. Some of my images are assaulting or unexpected in the same way. You can see that I’m drawn to certain types of imagery, whether it’s very sharp buildings or exaggerated lines of bodies. I’m drawn to that kind of material in the first place, because I don’t buy or pick up just anything. Like the other day I found this book of 1960s architecture and city planning in West Germany, and I got a lot of really beautiful black and white images from that.

I’m also definitely inspired by German Dada, and I remember the first time I saw a Hannah Höch piece in a Berlin museum. There are a lot of artists I like and consume myself but don’t draw inspiration from. Instead of people, what influences me is my interactions with things around me, my interpersonal interactions and experiences, and how the environment affects those. More than anything, my inspiration has to do with the mood or state of being that I’m in. There’s not that much more that goes into it besides whatever my brain decides is the right way to order something. Sometimes my art is more political than others, and some of it is very explicit. Recently I’ve been making lots of healthcare-related art, and that’s for a purpose. I do make stuff that’s on-the-nose commentary in direct response to a political environment, especially in the US, and especially as an outsider in a foreign country looking back and experiencing life in a different way than the whole country.

LS: I actually wanted to ask how the perspective of living in a foreign country fits into the whole interplay between words and images in your collages, like how you integrate this new lingual setting you’re in into your work as well.

SC: That’s really interesting, because when you’re first learning a language, you hear it, but you don’t recognize distinctive words or make sense of meaning unless you’ve heard it a lot. Coming to Germany, you’re existing in a place of ignorance, and not necessarily in a negative way — you’re just not clued into the world around you. The environment is a very different place when you don’t know the language, but as you become more familiar with German, it starts to make more sense on how to combine images with words and everyday life. It’s a process of getting to know the language.

I’m by no means fluent in German, and there’s a certain persona that comes with speaking where I feel internally distanced because words come out of my mouth in a way that’s still unnatural to me. You can tell with the earlier work I was first making in Germany that I used words I was attracted to, a lot of them had to do with buildings. It wasn’t really about building my vocabulary, but my familiarity with the language. It’s also a process of things becoming unfamiliar again. I feel like learning German will be a lifelong process, and as a language, it’s been quite significant to me. It’s very structured, but there’s also a lot of interesting play in it, and collage has historically been a way that the language is repurposed. I like to think I’m repurposing it in a way for myself as well. So it’s a process of learning and unlearning and figuring out what role German plays in my life.

LS: I can’t help but think of the compound nouns you can build with German. Like you can just tack a shit ton of words together and create something new.

SC: Exactly, I really, really like that about German and even if I’m not using German words in my collages, I sometimes title them in German. It has a lot to do with this ability to smash verbs and nouns together. With the language, you have the authority to use it how you want, even though it exists within this pretty rigid structure. But with the words themselves you can express a lot. It allows me to construct whatever new meanings I want, which is something that’s policed in English.

LS: What are some pieces you’re working on now?

SC: Recently I’ve gotten into making more 3D stuff, and I’ve been working on these giant, square canvases. Those take a little bit more planning, just because it’s a larger space to cover and there’s more harmony that has to go into creating a piece. But it’s still quite accidental how it comes together. Something that I’ve been doing during quarantine is planning trades with other artists. I have this specific trade with a queer tattoo artist from Poland, Mati Berlin (@Mati2.0__). He’s interpreting this giant piece I did, which actually took a lot more planning before I decided on a composition I was happy with. There are different kinds of characters in it, which I sent to him before pasting them down so he could look at and interpret them individually. He gave me artistic freedom because he likes forms and movement, but he showed me some poetry that he likes, so I made something out of his inspiration and mine. Now he’s interpreting the piece in tattoo form.

LS: As we wrap things up, are there any comments or criticisms you have for the general artist community looking towards the future?

SC: Something that I can say about collage art has to do with the internet.There’s two sides of the same coin: it’s democratized the ability for people to create art, but it’s also collapsed the context of creating a collage, which for me is really physical. There’s this process of getting new material — I seek things out, but it’s based entirely on what I stumble upon. Sometimes it’s hard to translate that over the internet.

I have a lot of criticisms for the art community in general. I don’t think there’s that much space for doing something that doesn’t have a long precedent accepted by a larger community of viewers who deem what is appropriate art and what’s not. I think there’s a lot of sad and unnecessary gatekeeping that either makes you an artist worthy of high culture — that your art should cost a lot of money and a lot of people want to consume it — or it’s seen as low culture, DIY, something kitschy you did without a degree or training. I think tearing down that distinction is important moving forward, because the fact that people are still paying millions of dollars for dead white men’s paintings and legitimately amazing artists can’t make a living while they’re alive is depressing. That needs to stop.

Art is so disgustingly tied up with capital. The intention to sell something is a complicated thing and a lot of that form of acceptability in the art community is very performative. Maybe some magazines try to do queer or disabled editions, but there aren’t that many where that’s their main role and they’re accepted by a larger audience. SICK magazine is one that does something like that really well, and it’s only chronically sick or disabled artists who contribute to it. It’s a space where disabled people can explore whatever they want, instead of being allowed to explore just one part of them that’s accepted by a larger community.

In general it’s kind of hard to have access to making a living off of your art or being taken seriously as not just a kind of token artist or one trick pony who only makes things about being disabled or queer. It’s interesting for me making art that’s obviously a lot about the body, which I connect with because of my own dislocation and disconnection with my sick body. Sometimes my art does explicitly collide with my chronic medical illness. I think the context of my art is queerness and disability — I wouldn’t say that everything I make is a part of that, but it’s definitely inspired by those parts of myself. Disabled artists and creators are fetishized for their actual bodies being disabled, and that’s the focus of inspiration porn. So part of what I like to do is make art that questions that. A lot of the things I create are not comfortable to look at, lots of meat and torn up parts. Maybe it’s not the most comfortable thing for a viewer to confront, but the thing is I don’t make art for a viewer, I make it as a mirror of myself.

Sarah Courville is a mixed-media collage artist and activist living and working in Berlin, Germany. Centering on the lenses of queerness and disability, Sarah’s work confronts the dichotomies of chaos/order, violence/peace, and incarnation/disembodiment. As sites for queer surrealism and futurist im/possibility, Sarah’s collages beckon onlookers to reconceptualize their understanding of the power structures dictating our lives. Made by hand from existing print material, Sarah’s collages are an emotional practice of mental and visual organization. Her work has been published in SICK Magazine, Soft Punk, Journal of Art Criticism, and Ratrock Magazine, among others. Her portfolio can be found on her website www.unstrukturiert.org and her Instagram @99999.9unstrukturiert.

lili steffen is still trying to find her calling in the world, but she likes to think of herself as a word artist and lover of language. vacillating between the vague and the concrete, she enjoys the creativity written word affords, from poetic, lyrical fragments, to pragmatic, informative texts. like every human, she is fragmented and discontinuous, and her passions lie somewhere at the intersection of reproductive justice, graphic design, folk music, vaporwave aesthetics, and digital reality.

Queer Surrealism & Futurist Analog Collage was originally published in Anomaly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.