Sensing OtherWise by Sarah Drapeau

Both the interview featured in the latest School of Commons newsletter and Sarah Drapeau’s online exhibition are framed by a shared inquiry: Embracing Complexity: Exploring Transdisciplinarity, Moss, and Radical Softness with Sarah Drapeau.

Across all facets of her work, one can sense the role of intuition and a deep path toward self-exploration—always situated within a world that asks us to navigate, select tools, and experiment with evolving approaches.

The show draws inspiration from Sarah’s contribution to Issues 2024, titled “Hybrid Tools for Transdisciplinarity”. This piece is at once a personal narrative and a profound meditation on the intersections of self-knowledge, collaboration, cooperation, and commoning. As Sarah writes, “This is already a research happening and living in me, anyway.” The exhibition takes this sentiment—the personal as embedded within the relational—and extends it into a visual dramaturgy: dynamic, nonlinear, inquisitive, and gently probing complex and often difficult themes.

In this online exhibition, Sarah’s work (images, fragments from her text, videos, and documentation of her collaborative work) leads us into a visual terrain where the deliberate and the instinctual converge. “This is like taking a picture of a movement,” she notes. And indeed, the show negotiates a fluid boundary between structure and spontaneity—offering compositions that are at once architectural and organic, mysterious and familiar, rare and common, personal and public.

Her layered approach reveals itself in fragmented yet interconnected gestures: marks that echo both the tools of nature and those we invent; vivid fields of environmental color alongside tonal gradations that foreground the human hand. These subtle transparencies hint at a scaffolding of structure, while also evoking the ephemeral qualities of memory, experience, and continuous learning—learning that is internal yet always entangled with surrounding elements, actors, and influences.

The digital space becomes an ideal setting for this interplay. Free from physical constraints, still images shift and reorient, while moving images breathe life into the notion of process and transformation. The result invites slower, more contemplative encounters.

As Sarah’s work and words suggest, the aspiration lies in sensing OtherWise: sensing other wise, sensing, other, wise.