RESIDENCY EXHIBITION SERIES
OCT 18 – NOV 18, 2025
Sara Dittrich
Ripples & Folds
Ripples & Folds features work by Artist-in-Residence Sara Dittrich. The exhibition includes biometric data-driven video, timelapse imaging, and cyanotype collages. Dittrich’s multimedia art practice explores possibilities for melding the body with landscapes while revealing their interconnectedness.
“…I am interested in timelapse as a tool to shift perspective, to see what we can’t on our own…”— Sara Dittrich
Sara Dittrich is a Baltimore-based interdisciplinary artist. Recent projects have included time-lapse imaging of landscapes, local skies and tidal patterns, and the somatic effects of time and a place on the body. Trained as both musician and visual artist, Dittrich creates multisensory experiences that are experienced in real-time using musical thinking to illuminate the dynamic and unconscious rhythms of the body and environments. Dittrich’s work has been exhibited with the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Sculpture Center (Cleveland), and DiverseWorks (Houston). Residencies and research programs have included Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Sculpture Space, and Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (Prague). She is the recipient of a Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and Mary Sawyers Baker Artist Award.
The clouds move on, but I am still here. documentation of participatory installation with video projection and heart pulse sensor.
Gestures of a Prayer Plant. video documentation of video projected on floating screen.
Wavelengths. video documentation of multimedia wall installation with collaged laser cut cyanotype prints, IV stand, tubing, water pump, electronics.
Artist’s Statement About the Work
The clouds move on, but I am still here invites visitors to sit at a small table in the center of the gallery and place their hand on a heart pulse sensor. As the sensor calculates their heart rate in real time, the viewer watches a projection-mapped timelapse of clouds rolling by in the sky. The playback speed of the timelapse changes in relation to how fast or slow their heart pulse is. The clouds move on, but I am still here creates a way to slow down the viewer and make them aware of their heartbeat by visualizing the the heartbeat outside of the body and in relation to their surroundings.
Gestures of a Prayer Plant features a 24-hour timelapse of the daily movements of a prayer plant (maranta leuconeura). By day, its leaves are flat and open, and at night, its leaves raise up, folding like praying hands. When visitors first enter the exhibition they see the live prayer plant by the title wall. Over the past several years I have been filming and collecting timelapses that range from landscapes to the slow observation of changing shadows in my living space. With this particular study I am interested in how these plant movements might relate to the body and vice versa. And also how to use timelapse as a tool to shift perspective, to see what we can’t on our own.
Keeping Pace is a series of paper-based works that build collaged imagery resembling nervous and respiratory systems. They are created through a cyanotype photographic printing process where tree leaves and other foliage are exposed to the sun on chemically coated paper to create cyan-blue prints. The process of cyanotype printing with multiple exposures is slow, repetitive, and laborious. The process is itself healing. It is a tool to get the body moving while also giving time to reflect on the interconnectivity of the body and the land it inhabits.
Wavelengths is an active wall installation that utilizes the materiality of water, a symbol of healing. The work uses collaged cyanotype prints and a custom water pump that pumps water through the installation at one second intervals. The tubing is woven throughout the collaged prints. The laser cut pattern simultaneously references ripples in water, sound waves, veins, and even fingerprint ridges. The custom pump alludes to an IV bag or medical device, creating its own pulse. Just as our bodies consist mostly of water, so does the Earth.