Sharon Hart Receives Prestigious SECAC Artist Fellowship

Sharon Hart, MFA,  Associate Professor, Visual Arts and Art History, recently received a prestigious SECAC Artist Fellowship.  SECAC is an organization devoted to the promotion of art in higher education through facilitating cooperation among teachers and administrators in universities and colleges‚ professional institutions and the community served by their institutions. The SECAC Fellowship was established in 1981 for the purpose of supporting member artists and to encourage individual creative growth‚ the development of new ideas for exhibitions and creative projects. Through this program‚ SECAC can more completely serve member artists and institutions. The award comes with a $5,000 stipend.

Hart’s work explores ecology, ephemerality, and collaboration with the natural world through experimental and cameraless photography. Hart was awarded the SECAC Artist Fellowship to expand upon her work, Dark Tracing, which is made at the transitional edge of the sea near her home. In her process, an enigmatic microcosm of the ocean is imprinted directly on her light sensitive paper. She makes a tea from washed-ashore seaweed to develop these images. Then, sea saltwater is used to stabilize them, incorporating a place-based narrative into the final material prints. During the fellowship period, Hart will continue making camer aless photographs along the local shoreline and will venture beyond and delve deeper into the coastal ecology of the immediate area. She will investigate additional place-specific materials that can be utilized to develop images in an environmentally friendly manner. Hart will also photograph the surrounding landscape and process her film using homemade seaweed-based negative developer. Her work serves as a form of activism, drawing attention to pressing environmental issues through an exploration of place, climate, and the sea, while embracing more eco-friendly methods of photographic image-making.