Samuel Joseph Crookston Herschlag

Sculpture provides the medium through which the individual, subjective experience becomes physical. My work channels the fortitude required to live with invisible illness, in pain, and otherwise at odds with the perceptions of others.

Growing up with an undiagnosed congenital malformation, I looked like a normal child, but lived with chronic pain and cognitive impairment. Migraines, coordination issues, and brain fog–the scent of mild cleaning detergents, cigarette smoke, even laughing at a friend’s joke–triggered debilitating pain. 

It wasn’t until the age of twenty that I was diagnosed with Arnold Chiari Malformation. My cerebellum had herniated 29mm through my skull, pressing against my brain stem and putting me at risk for losing the function of my arms and legs. I underwent an invasive procedure to treat the malformation and mitigate many symptoms. As terrifying as my diagnosis and surgery were, it was oddly liberating–after years of invisible pain there was finally a physical explanation for my suffering. Peers, doctors, teachers, and family recognized, for the first time, the validity of my internal experience. Much of my pain and brain fog have lifted, but the feeling of incongruity between my two selves influences my life and my art to this day. 

My work is an unvarnished interpretation of surmounting the hardships presented by the body. Having experienced the limitations of the visual, I seek to create a tactile representation of the subjective. Through the occupation of physical space, the invisible becomes tangible, and the subjective becomes undeniable inviting the viewer to partake in the previously inaccessible experience. My practice as an artist is a manifestation of my bodily experiences in an attempt to process them and connect with others. 

The natural world is prominent in my work, but I don’t rely on its inherent beauty. Using wood, metal and other materials that have been subject to change through natural elements, I preserve and transform the temporary, the decomposing, into hybrid industrial creations.  Oxidation, degradation, and preservation of all forms is a means of connecting the ordinary to the complex experience of living with pain. 

Transforming public space, and inviting viewers to engage with art in an intimate and experiential way requires not only skill, but a commitment to scale. Through my practice as an artist I have the opportunity to increase the scale and therefore the accessibility of my work. Encountering these creations on the streets or in the park means that the passersby is not beholden to the visual, but can walk inside, participate with them, and see the outside world from within. 

Textures of decomposition hold within them a story that I work to examine and relate to my experience living with pain. The traces within decomposing materials inform how I interact with them. Not only am I preserving the material itself, I attempt to elevate it to be seen, witnessed, and experienced. It is this synthetic interplay that fascinates me–between the temporal, and the ethereal–that marks the world as changed, strange, and more interesting, perhaps, than it was before.