SARAH HAVILAND

Artist Statement

Sarah Haviland’s sculpture, installation, and mixed-media works combine images of real birds with mythical stories. They form an ongoing project called “Becoming a Bird,” which encourages awareness of birds around us and their crucial importance in our lives and imaginations. Her artwork reflects historical human-bird connections in cultures around the world—from Asia, the Americas, the Middle East—as well as contemporary societal and environmental issues. Haviland uses simple hardware store materials like wire and mesh along with upcycled scraps and found objects to call attention to endangered species, migration of birds and humans, and our own psychic condition.

Artist Bio

Sarah Haviland is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist whose recent work focuses on cross-cultural human-bird imagery and the environment. Her abstract-figurative sculptures and public art installations have been exhibited widely in parks, museums, galleries, educational institutions, and healthcare settings in the United States and abroad, including Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ; Pratt Sculpture Park in Brooklyn; the Flatiron Prow Art Space and NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan; and the National Marine Museum in Taiwan. In 2018-2019 she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in Taiwan. She has had recent international residencies at the Burren College of Art in Ireland and the Valparaiso Foundation in Spain. Sarah Haviland earned a BA from Yale University and an MFA from Hunter College.