Sarah Fox Untangling the Snare

Sarah Fox presents Untangling the Snare in the Cecily E. Horton Gallery this fall. Sarah shares about the exhibit “The world speaks to us through everything she holds, sometimes in whispers, sometimes in screams. I see the way grass turns brown under the blazing Texas sun, her blades curling inward. I watch how the San Antonio River breathes differently in drought and flood, her moods teaching me about survival and rage. But she also speaks through folk and fairy tales that have warned us for centuries: don’t enter the forest at night; don’t marry the man who hides his true nature.

Celtic and Norse folklore tell of selkies—captured feminine creatures who slip between seal and human form by shedding or wearing their seal skins. In these tales, a fishman steals the selkie’s skin to trap her on land as his wife. These stories echo a familiar violence: worldwide, nearly 1 in 3 women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence. If these statistics reflected mental and verbal abuse, the numbers would be far higher. They steal our wildness and call it love.

In this body of work, I’ve woven sculpture, puppetry, performance into a two-act fable of my own making, Untangling the Snare. Archetypal hybrid creatures take form as marionettes and masks, culminating in a video work and live performance. Through these multi-media vessels, a folk tale of female solidarity and escape is born.

In this tale, women find themselves held by Mother Nature, guided by her, set free by remembering their own strength. Through my work, I seek to remind everyone, especially women, that we are not separate from the natural world’s power and wisdom—we are part of her endless capacity for resilience, transformation, and righteous fury.

The first step in freeing yourself from oppression is being able to imagine a way out and a better future.”

Sarah Fox’s multimedia narratives and characters emerge from embodied experiences of femme-read subjects and gendered bodies. Her stories of life, loss, and love are carried by archetypal hybrid beings that subvert and expand normative notions of femininity. Drawing from folklore, religion, film, pop culture, erotic art, and literature, the artist reveals feminist counter-narratives—figures who defy hegemonic gender systems and resist patriarchal modes of representation.

At the core of her practice is the body—particularly the feminized body—as a political territory, a contested site of projection and rejection, of control and rebellion. Bodies that are read as “too much”—too old, too sexual, too beautiful, too powerful, too autonomous, or simply not functioning the way they are “supposed to”—are quickly cast as deviant, as monstrous in patriarchal narratives. Witches, sirens, fairies, harpies, banshees, monsters—these are not merely mythical figures but manifestations of a misogynistic fear of female autonomy and power. These discourses stretch from religious reinterpretations of once-revered goddesses to contemporary pop culture.

Through a visual language that spans diverse media, Fox explores the figure of the vilified, exiled, or subversive woman as a site of ambiguity, resistance, and transformative power. Her work stands as a reclamation of bodies and stories that have long been silenced, suppressed, or demonized.

Fox lives and works in San Antonio, Texas. She received a BA from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, where she studied studio art and feminist theory. She received an MFA in studio art from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She teaches at Texas A&M University-San Antonio and is the Mentor-Artist for students in the MOSAIC Student Artist Program at the Contemporary at Bluestar.