Sadie Rebecca Starnes was born in the American South, 1985, and spent her formative years in the foothills and mountains of North Carolina. After completing BAs in Art History and Painting, she moved to New York City and then Tokyo, where she currently resides in the suburban fringes of the city.
Her work is conceptually grounded in the South, its myths and sins, and her family’s history within it. Thus she continually returns, almost involuntarily, to the cultural iconography of the pasture, the mule, birth, salt – enveloped within depictions of ancestors, living relatives, men, and her own childhood.
These paintings concern afterbirth as representative of the phenomena of Panmnesia – a belief that no memory is ever lost or inaccessible to the mind. This afterbirth is the placental glimpse of both inherited and constructed selfness, the piecemeal bridging between individual recollection and heritage and , primarily, a blue to pink interpretation of memory’s profound influence – as dubious as it is telling – in present life.