Today, we’d like to introduce you to Sarah Elise Paulsen.
Hi Sarah, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
After years of people pleasing and seeking my worth in achievement, parenting knocked me down and became a reckoning for my spirit and ego.
In the present slowness of raising a child, I faced myself: my lack of self-compassion, my anxiety masked as achievement, my overworking, and my disconnection from my body. All of this led me to meditation in a myriad of forms. When the pandemic happened, unbeknownst to me, I started to work on this transformation, and that is the stuff in my book of illustrations, Mother(ing) as Meditation.
The skills of making a book existed in me – I was trained as a painter and later began to explore time-based storytelling through stop-motion animation. I love storytelling, both hearing stories and having a good one to tell myself. I treasure the act of making things by hand.
I grew up in Kirkwood, Missouri, both a suburban-raised white girl “A” student, a competitive swimmer, and an eccentric outsider artist. I lived in Columbia, MO, while attending college and then later worked there in the Arts. My early teaching experiences were at art camps, sub-teaching, and a bootstrap community arts program called the CARE Gallery. I returned to St. Louis to get my MFA at Washington University in 2005 and have since been working as a teaching artist.
During my twenty-year career in the arts, my work has ranged in media from paintings to stop-motion animations to parades. I made stop motion animated video installations about the ‘Invention of Whiteness’ for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Great Rivers Biennial, and an animated documentary movie about healing after a mass shooting in “Elegy to Connie.”
I started a community parade, and I collaborated with a ton of people. My artworks have been shown around the U.S., and throughout this experience, my work has been lifted up by so many.
Currently, I teach at MMS, where 13 y/o truth-tellers teach me how to play among art materials and rap in the classroom. I additionally teach painting, video, and professional practices at Forest Park Community College, where I work with a diverse range of students and support them in making their creative projects real.
I’m an older mom, in part because when I was 13, I started taking care of my little brother as a baby, which became the best form of birth control. I didn’t want kids for a long time. Raising little kids is hard! I spent a number of years focused on my art practice, and my son was born at the same time I achieved a career high note in the GRB.
While I relearned who I was as a mother, I experienced a tidal wave of ego breakdown that messed with all my ideas of success and pushed me back to the present moment via my newborn son. In reckoning with my worst tendencies and shadow self, I was pushed into a parental consciousness awakening.
This growth has taken me from external validation and abandoning my own needs to redefining internal markers of balance, happiness, and pleasure. My footprint in the art world right now is slower and more focused on my well-being.
We all face challenges, but would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Motherhood is teaching me boundaries.
My college teacher said if you can be anything other than an artist, you can do that. Perhaps being a teacher is the closest I’ve had to another role, but there is some part of me that deeply needs my art practice. Making art is an act of contemplation, and sharing the work is a space of connection.
Being an artist is also choosing an unknown, and I’ve juggled a number of ways of making a living while also maintaining my art practice. Aspects of my art practice connected to ritual & storytelling, community building, and collective awakening aren’t profit-driven. I make the work I think needs to exist in the world. I rely on my teaching income to supplement my art income. My projects that are idea-driven are often supported by grants and fellowships. While I sell original artworks, I am also experimenting with offering prints and my current book project in an effort to make affordable works that can get into people’s hands at lower costs.
Fortunately, I have the gift of a supportive family and community that has encouraged me and joined me on this ride. Most of the time, my intuition helps me identify a gut-driven project that I need to make, and then, because of my enthusiasm and ability to find solid collaborators, we make it happen. Often without training (I didn’t know how to make a book!), I learn by doing the project.
That said, these things I know about myself: I don’t want a 40-hour work week, but if you consider the work I do teach with that of caregiving and having art practices, it’s well over that number. How do I stay alive? This is where those boundaries come back in, I’ve entered the big slow down. In a capitalist society that undervalues communal creative contributions, I’m focusing my daily presence on tapping into my needs and being in a different space/time experience with my career.
As my friend Leslie Salisbury says, “My body is my retirement plan”- tending to my body and mental health is essential for the longevity of my practice. A few years ago, I injured my lower back and was out of commission for a few months.
This drives me to the importance of tending my body and emotions in order for me to show up as a parent, teacher, and artist. To that end, I’m going to move my body an hour a day. Each week, I’m going to participate in community activities, probably through a somatic practice. (dancing, singing, listening to music, meditation, whatever). I say this after I had one of my busiest teaching semesters this past spring, but it is an aspiration and goal I maintain.
Yes, it’s hard to be an artist and make a living just selling work in the city- that’s the baseline. So, I accept that I won’t make a full-time living off my work, I do work that feels purposeful to me, and I do radical self-care.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. What can you tell our readers who might not be as familiar with your work?
I’m proud of figuring out how to balance life as an artist/mother/teacher and the ways that I have grown as a mom, adjusted to this transition, and raised my son.
My art centers engagement with social change through the sharing of stories in community spaces. I make work about subcultures, outsiders, and the informal configurations of community. I examine identity through illustrating stories that are intimate and comment on larger social issues. Primarily I work with paint, but I additionally construct animated films made from my artwork, using stop motion animation techniques.
In the past year, I had a retrospective solo show at the Swope Museum in Indiana. It was incredible to see the arc of my work and the threads through my making. Last year, I checked a few things off my bucket list when I self-published a book! As part of my culminating project and art show with the Kranzberg Artists Residencies, I self-published my book Mother(ing) as Meditation.
I’m proud of how the community came together at the artist panel and through a workshop for caregivers. Prior to that, the body of work around the theme, the “Invention of Whiteness,” that culminated at the CAM was shaped through shows and conversations at the Kranzberg Gallery and Brown University. Participating in group thinking and dialogue around naming whiteness heavily impacted the scope and content of that work.
Previously, the years I spent making my animated documentary, Elegy to Connie, about the 2008 mass shooting in Kirkwood and then sharing that film through screenings and conversation were powerful tools towards healing from that event for myself and other participants. The ways I explored collaborations within these projects, looked at personal and communal history, and played with forms of inviting others into the conversation continue to be important aspects of my art practice. I can track how I have grown as an artist through these methods of creating these works.
Currently Natalie Baldeon and I are collaborating on short workshops for caregivers where we combine art making and mindfulness practices. I have a fun time collaborating with her, she is such a master artist, and the combinations of practices in these offerings are meaningful to me.
Can you talk to us about happiness and what makes you happy?
I am resourced by my ongoing daily walking practice, and like an obstinate sled dog, I am at Tower Grove Park almost every day, in all weather. I’m nourished by the passing of seasons and the symphony of blooming things I’ve come to anticipate.
I have a dancing spirit and am exploring the connection with myself and dance through the ecstatic dances hosted by Erin Duffy Burke. I am a part of a sangha called Midwest Moon, where I learn to cultivate my sitting meditation practice so I can be present to “what is” or the acceptance of the present moment, while also making friends with my inner hater. I am a regular at the New Music Circle shows, where the present-moment tracking of sounds I encounter in experimental music yields in me what I will describe as a sonorous catharsis.
Spending time with my son adventuring around the city gives me a sense of travel when I’m tied here due to parenting and lack of funds. Gathering with friends and family gives me a sense of belonging and shared joy. My book is available at Betty’s Books, a beloved graphic novel and comic shop in Webster Groves. My son and I are regular patrons, and I am treasuring my growing Graphic Novel collection.
Please see my Etsy site – https://www.etsy.com/shop/ladypainterart. Saatchi site – https://www.saatchiart.com/sarahpaulsen and buy my book! http://www.sarahpaulsen.com/store/p2/Mother%28ing%29_as_Meditation_Book.html!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.sarahpaulsen.com
- Instagram: @sarahpaulsen77
- Facebook: @sarah.paulsen.31
- Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user29691879
- Other: etsy.com/shop/ladypainterart
Image Credits
Lyndsey Scott, Workshop with Natalie BALDEÓN by Dayna Kris, Making Sense at The Swope Museum of Art 2024, Mother(ing) as Meditation, Tidal Wave, The Invention of Whiteness at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2018, Dusty Kessler, and Animation Still from Elegy to Connie, (2014)
