Sarah Elizabeth Cornejo’s Serpentine Sculptures

On view at Crosstown Arts, the artist’s work challenges the need to categorize.

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“We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most.” — Robert Macfarlane

The double-headed snake is still, eerily still. It spans seven feet as it coils around itself, its spine impossibly flexible. Sand surrounds it, as if it has broken through the earth’s crust from another realm, leaving only silence in its wake.

The snake — Amaru — is the creation of Sarah Elizabeth Cornejo, who by comparison stands just over five feet against the imposing sculpture with its armored exterior. She speaks of its existence as separate from hers, not bound to her but instead possessing its own power and otherworldly space in our world. It’s neither threatening nor welcoming. It just is, and for viewers, that in-between can be unsettling. Yet that’s the point, Cornejo says.

The inspiration for the snake itself stems from Incan mythology’s amaruca, double-headed serpents. “They’re supposed to dwell in deep waters or the deep earth. They maintain equilibrium,” Cornejo explains. “The mythology is that earthquakes or natural disasters would be something that they would cause to restore the balance. They’re also not concerned with humanity’s perpetual existence. It’s the idea that the earth will persist, whether or not humanity is there for it, which I think is a difficult thing for humans to contend with.”

And with that Cornejo hopes that the Crosstown Arts Galleries, where Amaru resides for her latest exhibition, “Those Who Hold Dominion Here,” becomes a space of reckoning — “a liminal space to reflect on our actions on Earth,” she says, whether that be how we interact with others, with our identities, or with our surroundings.

Spinning the Mythos

For Cornejo, the mythology of snakes encapsulates the liminal (or in-between, threshold-like) space of her own mixed Latinx and Southern identity, with snakes popping up in both South American legends and Southern folklore. “I have one parent who is an immigrant from Peru and one who’s from the South,” she says. “Those two identities clash quite a bit, especially in the South. There’s a need for white folks to categorize me or to have these binaries, and it makes people uncomfortable when those binaries are challenged.”

Similarly, she says, “I think snakes are particularly unnerving for people. Part of that is like the bilateral movement and there’s all these things that kind of make them uncomfortable.”

Yet, because of this, snakes fascinate those like Cornejo’s grandfather. “He was a forester [in South Carolina],” she says. “I spent the last three years of high school there, and I loved having that time with my grandfather. He was like a wonderful reprieve from some of the things there. And he also just was incredibly open-minded and into all the phenomena around him.”

As Cornejo grew in her studies, she channeled a similar curiosity in nature as she pursued a degree, initially, in the sciences at Davidson College, before changing her major to English and studio art. But that curiosity stayed with her, longing for a spark to ignite into a passion.

“I had no intention of becoming an artist,” she says, “up until my last semester of my senior year. I was using what I was doing as an English major as my research and fodder for my show for my thesis. It was questioning, like, ‘Why do we live within the binaries we do? Why do we believe the things we believe?’

“That felt really important — like I found the reason I was doing [my art]. I was like, ‘This is how I want to interact with the world, and this is how I want to interact with these difficult topics, and this is how I want to have these difficult conversations for myself to grow as a person.’”

“I think as I’ve gotten older and being in the South and dealing with being Latinx and being white-passing, I’ve been really, really interested in that presence — in those binaries and in abjection. How are we ‘other’ and then what we’re capable of doing to another [person]? What does it take for us to see something as not ‘us’? How are these categories holding these very real, often violent consequences in our lives?”

Part of this personal and creative growth, for Cornejo, meant looking back to her South American roots. “We’re raised by our parents and then we leave and we’re left to examine how we were raised by our parents,” the artist says. “As an adult I’m more interested in understanding my own heritage and where I come from, very fully and layered — all these things that are maybe being plowed over by these greater forces that imposed themselves upon an existing culture.”

The greater forces, being the perpetual consequences of colonialism in the Americas, the systemic and systematic racism, Cornejo says, have left behind “remnants of a whole culture” — remnants that she confronts as she works each fantastical being into sculptural existence.

“I think as I’ve gotten older and being in the South and dealing with being Latinx and being white-passing, I’ve been really, really interested in that presence — in those binaries and in abjection. How are we ‘other’ and then what we’re capable of doing to another [person]? What does it take for us to see something as not ‘us’? How are these categories holding these very real, often violent consequences in our lives?”

Assembling the Remnants

Cornejo offers no answers in her work — only posing questions and possibilities. In the Crosstown Arts gallery space, she invites the viewer into the liminal away from our violent reality, where her Amaru lies along with another two-headed creature that pokes its heads above ground on the other end of the room. On the wall hang two black portals — an entrance and an exit.

Only a closer look at the creatures reveals the sculptures’ materials. Collected by or given to Cornejo, coquina shells coat the body as scales, dried seaweed grouts in between, pig hairs sprout from the spine, seahorses are embedded in the skin along with rusted nails and bullet casings, and deer and goat skulls form one of the creature’s own heads. These are all materials that have been discarded, exploited, or neglected, and they carry a charge by allowing a viewer to consider each piece’s backstory.

As an example, Cornejo points to the pig hairs, brushed off the pigs at her family home in the Carolinas during the summer months. Though some, like Cornejo, may have a personal connection to these animals, most likely the average viewer in an urban setting such as Crosstown does not.

“And then you bring it into a gallery space,” she says, “and people are like, ‘Oh, this is so pretty. Let me get closer.’ And then it’s kind of this sucker punch of what the material actually is. … And they can be a window into how complex [nature] is or even how poorly treated these animals can be.”

In the past, Cornejo has even used her younger sister’s hair, cut off after cancer treatment; skin from an alligator shot after killing a neighbor’s dog; and animal skulls collected by her late grandfather. She also has tarantula exoskeletons from her friend’s pet, named Legs, to use in future projects. So, some of the pieces hold personal value for the artist. “It’s so finite too,” Cornejo adds. “Like, I will never have this again. And material like that, you don’t just throw that on something. You think about it.”

Other materials Cornejo simply found by walking around, and in her recent projects since moving to Memphis in 2020 with her husband, Cornejo began incorporating more urban materials, in addition to the natural ones. “I walk my dogs three times a day, and I’ll find the remnants of something that happened in the night,” she says. “It’ll be like shattered glass all over one part of the street, so I’ll pick all that out. It’s the remnants of something that was violent — whether someone being violent towards someone else or whether it was a car crash.”

Naturally, this juxtaposition of these urban remnants of violence with more natural or agricultural objects leads to a sort of tension between what is human-inflicted and what is natural, what we feel connected to and disconnected from. Is this creature beautiful, or is it macabre? Does it belong to this world or another? Does it inhabit the future or the past? How do we navigate this liminal space?

The answer, for now, is unknown, but what is known, Cornejo says, is that our need to categorize and to ‘other’ has led us here, perhaps one day leading us to a world, like the one imagined in the gallery, without a human-centric existence.

“Humans have such a fractured relationship to nature, which I don’t think is separate from their fractured relationship to each other or to themselves as beings,” she says. “And I don’t think we can talk about the environment without talking about racism, about feminism, about all these [intersecting issues].” Art is the language through which Cornejo is drawn to communicate her frustrations, with each material she uses holding a part of the narrative she wishes to convey.

Dominion of Space

For the sculptor, her art is political, especially as it interrogates dominant narratives, highlighting the marginalized, from the forgotten bullet casings to lesser known Incan myths. But, Cornejo says, it’s even more political as her work interrogates the physical space it occupies.

The act of viewing and engaging with art is in itself privileged, she says. Not everyone has the time or the means to visit galleries or museums, but for those who do, these larger-than-life sculptures almost challenge that privilege, simply by their mere size and shape.

“They dictate their own space,” Cornejo explains. “You have to walk around the sculpture at a certain distance, and there are nails and bullet casings keeping you at a distance. They kind of have a defense mechanism.” If you walk too close or handle without care, the sculpture could break and, Cornejo says, most likely it’ll hurt you with its weight and jagged edges.

“When you’re using a set language that we understand and you’re making us see things totally different, I found that so fascinating and so much more useful sometimes than something like theory, which is an already privileged conversation.”

But the temptation to approach and to touch remains, as evidenced by footprints in the sand surrounding the pieces despite signs advising otherwise at Crosstown Arts. “I’ve actually never had this problem,” Cornejo says. “It is interesting to me, almost like how violent that footprint looks in this. I have no thoughts on that yet, except it’s just interesting and unexpected and I’m kind of seeing how that is going to land.”

Even so, for Cornejo, the challenges, like this among others, that come with working in three-dimensions drive her to continue in this form. “You have to improv every day,” she says. “Sculpture is knowing how to build things very skewed. Just because a tool does X, Y, Z, if you’re doing sculpture, you could use it for like 20 other things other than its intended use. So every time you make something, you’re learning and you’re growing and you’re acquiring.”

With that, she believes the artist earns permission to fail, to experiment, and, in a way, to engage in world-building as Cornejo does in creating her creatures and their own mythology. “It just feels a lot more liberating to play that way than to play in a 2D plane.”

“I have to remind myself that I can only make so many things in a year,” Cornejo says. “It takes so long to make stuff, and I really want to see this world and these things kind of fleshed out.” In a way, art becomes another mode of storytelling, another language possessing power to influence. “When you’re using a set language that we understand and you’re making us see things totally different, I found that so fascinating and so much more useful sometimes than something like theory, which is an already privileged conversation. It’s like the bodies [or the sculptures] speak before the person is able to speak.” Instead, the person is invited to sit in their thoughts, in that liminal space where conclusions don’t matter nearly as much as the questions.

“Those Who Hold Dominion Here” is on display at Crosstown Arts through March 5th, alongside concurrent exhibitions “Mending in a State of Abundance” by Katrina Perdue and “Summer in Shanghai” by Janaye Brown.