Sarah Blesener and Jenny Stratton

Oregon
Portfolio

Sarah Blesener and Jenny Stratton are artists, visual researchers, and educators. Their collaborative work emerges from questions, which they view as a primary medium: What if the memories we bury grow roots? How might collaborative visual storytelling practices reshape our relationships, and themselves be an act of care?

Project: To Bind Anew

To Bind Anew is a long-term participatory photographic project exploring how families and individuals remake themselves after rupture. It emerged from our own family experiences of loss and engaging with dreams, sound, poetry, and visual art as ways of communicating when words couldn’t be said or found. Since then, the project has grown through in-depth collaborations, including working alongside death-workers, chaplains, caregivers, and others who accompany people through profound transitions, asking: What does proximity to loss, grief, and other forms of change teach us about living? How does this knowledge reshape how we relate to ourselves, one another, and the world?