Sydney Perkins
Sydney Perkins is a self-taught, multidisciplinary artist from New England. She has spent the past seven years working and learning around the globe and now lives in the Sierra Foothills of California. Working in cyanotype, natural dye, ink, and mixed media, she explores reflection and mirroring between the human body and the natural world.
My work is a practice of curiosity and experimentation. Self-taught, I follow questions rather than rules and let materials show me what they want to do.
I’m interested in the places where our physical bodies and the natural world intertwine, and in how a single theme can reflect across different realms. Look at things the right way and they begin to mirror each other: the sea and the sky, body and water, plants and anatomy. Much of my work is an attempt to catch that mirroring and make it visible.
I work in cyanotype, ink and bleach, natural dye and batik, and mixed media. Many of these processes depend on elements outside my control, such as sunlight, water, pigment from plants, and the way a material bleeds or fades. I like that the work is made in collaboration with the natural world it’s about.
I think of this as a kind of metaphysical ecology. My pieces search for answers in the undercurrent of everything, in the connections that sit just beneath the surface until you shift how you look.
For a while now, magical realism has been the current and pervasive theme influencing my artwork. Incorporating magical elements into real life settings, blurring the line between fantasy and reality. What does it mean to take notice of the energy of the thing? Sometimes the story is more true than chain of events. How much do we lose by just taking people, places, and things at face value. How much more fun is it to believe in the undercurrent of everything?
I’ve traveled for many years, and wherever I go I look for the people who still make things by hand. I seek out artisans and traditional crafts, and I learn through apprenticeships, workshops, and guided tours. Spending time with a place’s materials and the techniques passed down through its makers teaches me things I couldn’t get any other way. Each craft carries a way of seeing, a relationship between a community and the land it draws from, and I bring that back into my own work. Learning this way keeps me a student, and it shapes how I think about materials. Each craft carries a way of seeing, a relationship between a community and the land it draws from, and I bring that back into my own work.