Sadie Sheldon

Exhibition Statement from Sadie Sheldon
Dust from the Devil’s Tongue examines the interval between impulse and action, when internal forces begin to change form. It approaches the subconscious as a structured space that organizes perception, memory, and behavior.

The work engages two traditions of transformation: the descent into the underworld and the alchemical stage of nigredo, the blackening phase in which decomposition precedes renewal. Darkness is treated as a generative condition, an environment in which previous forms dissolve so that new configurations can emerge. Disorientation and breakdown become necessary stages in processes of reconfiguration and rebirth.

The project draws on a photographic archive accumulated over decades. Images are recomposed through experimental and traditional darkroom techniques to construct landscapes that merge discrete memories into continuous terrain. In this process, the darkroom functions as a transitional chamber similar to the underworld, where fragments are reconfigured and integrated into altered forms of perception. Otherworldly landscapes assume the familiar strangeness of dreams, where psychic material is reshaped into unexpected insight.

Developed in response to a culture of constant visibility and excess information, the project adopts a slower methodology that reduces external noise in order to examine what remains internally active, asking what is essential and what can be released.

Interview with Sadie Sheldon

Questions by Sidney Mullis
With a focus on their residency and solo exhibition Dust from the Devil’s Tongue at VisArts in Richmond, VA
July 1, 2026

You recently finished a residency at VisArts in Richmond, VA, culminating in your solo exhibition Dust from the Devil’s Tongue. During the residency, you returned to the darkroom after many years away. What began as a photographic process expanded into a framework for your solo exhibition. How did working in the darkroom shape your thinking as you developed Dust from the Devil’s Tongue?
When I arrived at the residency I came with no particular project or medium in mind. VisArts is a very vibrant, active community building: lots of studios, busy classes and students, which brought so many opportunities for engaging with excited people, but that kind of constant external stimulus can also make concentration and contemplation difficult. I quickly gravitated to the darkroom because it was quiet and often empty. When I passed through the revolving door, I entered a void and the bright activity of the building receded into a dim red light accompanied by the steady running water of the photo baths.

Being in a darkroom again for the first time in over 20 years felt like a necessary return and the rhythms of that process reoriented my experience of time and attention. It is a space organized around waiting: waiting for vision to return, for the chemistry to work, and for an image to become visible. That gradual shift in perception made the room feel removed from ordinary time. Working alongside others there created an intimacy around the developing trays, while being there alone allowed my thoughts and emotions to expand. In both cases, the room made sustained attention feel possible.

A print takes only a few minutes to develop, but those minutes feel expansive. When an image forms in front of you, it appears gradually, like the inverse of a dream fading in the morning. Its final form remains uncertain until it has passed through every stage of development successfully. I became interested in the relationship between that slowness and the value we assign to images. Photographs once required time and intention to produce, while now we make and consume them so quickly that they often vanish from our attention, even as we preserve thousands of them.

This led me back to my own archive of negatives and digital photographs from the past 20 years. As I began to painstakingly composite images from different times and places, I stopped seeing them as isolated records and started thinking about how memories within us accumulate, overlap, and alter one another. I developed a complex analog process of developing these composite photos similar to Jerry Uelsmann, whose mastering and bending of the craft is incredible. The darkroom became more than a place where I was making straight-ahead prints. It offered a way of understanding how images, whether mental or photographic, remain dormant within us and how they might reappear in altered relationships and invented forms.

The exhibition grew from that logic and shaped my thinking about descent into shadow. In a culture that values exposure, expansion, and ascent, the darkroom revealed the importance of moving inward, toward what is not immediately visible.

The exhibition is dimly lit. The photographs within only become visible as a viewer moves through the space. Experiencing the exhibition reminded me of watching an image develop in the darkroom. Was the exhibition conceived as a kind of developmental space, where meaning reveals itself gradually rather than all at once?
Yes. I was interested in changing the conditions under which the photographs could be seen so that meaning would gather over time. We live with the expectation that everything should be immediately available, but access does not necessarily produce attention. Sometimes the more we are shown, the less we actually absorb.

Walking across the installation could briefly illuminate several photographs, but they were too small to understand from a distance. As a viewer moved closer to an individual image, the surrounding lights gradually turned off until that photograph was isolated within the room. Looking at one image therefore involved allowing others to disappear.

The room never offered a stable overview of itself, so it could only be understood through a sequence of singular encounters shaped by where a viewer moved and how long they lingered. Because that sequence was generated by the viewer’s body, the exhibition had no single, authoritative order. The viewer’s movement became a form of editing, temporarily composing the exhibition and allowing its meaning to develop through their particular path. In this way, the installation gave each viewer the agency to activate the work and shape how it unfolded around them.

One detail that fascinated me was the shelving structures used to display the photographs. Equipped with motion sensors, the shelves illuminated each image only when a viewer approached. Rather than functioning as a neutral support, the shelving actively shaped how the photographs were encountered, obscured, and revealed. How did this display approach develop, and what possibilities did it open for the work?
The structures came out of several practical needs. Each one had to support a photograph without fixing it permanently to the wall, cast light upward, conceal the electronics, and respond to a person entering its range. Their function was complex, so I kept their form spare.

I kept returning to the moment in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast where Belle moves through the castle past candles held by human arms emerging from the walls. The scene is beautiful and unsettling because the architecture appears to be alive, attending to her. I wanted something of that feeling: a world that becomes sentient as someone passes through it.

The finished supports were rough and irregular, with narrow openings where the light escaped. They reminded me of a group of stones or small altars whose purpose was no longer entirely knowable. By holding the photographs at a slight lean rather than hanging them conventionally, they also kept the images from feeling settled. I wanted the installation to feel temporary, as though anything within it might disappear at any moment.

The lighting system needed ongoing care throughout the exhibition. Rather than functioning as passive infrastructure, the lights required your attention and maintenance. How did this act of tending become part of the work’s meaning?
I assumed the lights would remain charged for the six-week exhibition, but their actual life depended on how many people entered, where they lingered, and how actively the room responded to them. Every week I returned to recharge the system, and that unpredictability made the lights feel less like equipment and more like something with its own metabolism.

As I worked, I thought about Charon, the ferryman of the dead in Greek myth, and other figures whose role is to keep a passage open between worlds. There was something meaningful in preparing the room for people I would never see, making sure it was ready to receive them and then leaving before they arrived. It also kept the exhibition from ending for me at the opening. Instead of completing the installation and stepping away, I remained responsible for it, and each return allowed me to encounter the work after the urgency of making it had passed.

 (3 photographs developed from source negatives and 1 composite photograph developed directly from the three negatives)

The photographs in Dust from the Devil’s Tongue draw from decades of personal photographs that you revisited and reworked during the development of the exhibition. What was it like to return to such an expansive archive of images?
Revisiting twenty-five years of photographs was fascinating because patterns became visible that I had never consciously recognized. Images made years apart repeatedly returned to similar subjects, like clouds above a slivered horizon, uncanny landforms and various representations of circles and mounds. I also began noticing recurring compositional decisions and ways of organizing space. Seen individually, the photographs had seemed connected to particular moments, but together they revealed a visual language that had been developing throughout my life.

The archive also showed me how unevenly photographs preserve memory. Some images returned me immediately to the moment, while others felt almost anonymous. I could recognize something as mine without remembering why I had photographed it. That distance made the images more open because they were no longer confined entirely within their original stories.

Once I began combining photographs from different times and locations, unexpected relationships emerged between them. Images that had nothing to do with one another began to share a horizon, atmosphere, or sense of space, generating landscapes that had never existed. The multi-stepped composite process with it’s customized masking tools and alignment systems allowed me to think metaphorically about both the creative and associative nature of memory, where separate experiences overlap and produce something new. Alchemy is a trending term right? But the darkroom is truly an alchemical laboratory in the medieval-turned-Jungian sense. Rather than simply documenting the past here in a nostalgic way, the archive became raw material for creating new visions of possibility that parallel the transformative inner work of the Self.

Many of the photographs combine different locations and experiences into a single terrain. They seem to mimic the way that memory or dreams can collapse multiple spaces into one. What interested you in constructing invented landscapes?
Memory is already an inventive process, even when we believe we’re being accurate. We borrow details, alter proportions, and fold one experience into another; sometimes we begin telling a story and realize midway through that part of it belongs to someone else. Dreams make this instability more visible, but waking thought is doing it all the time.

Constructing the landscapes allowed me to work inside that logic instead of treating distortion as a flaw. I wasn’t trying to make convincing fictional places so much as to give form to the way experience is compressed and reorganized within us. The resulting images are specific to my history, yet their estrangement from their original contexts makes them available to other people. A viewer may recognize the feeling of a place without recognizing the place itself, and that gap is where their own memory enters.

 At one end of the exhibition, a large-scale video framed by a bespoke papier-mâché frame shows a figure moving through a frozen landscape toward the viewer. As the figure removes its face, blood drips down the body, revealing a dark faceless void. The scene feels both unsettling and transformative. Who is this figure, and what role do they play within the larger narrative of Dust from the Devil’s Tongue?
The figure is both a messenger and a stand-in for the viewer. I imagined the exhibition as a space within the brief interval between impulse and action, where time slows enough for the memories, instincts, and inherited patterns beneath a decision to become visible. The video marks the entrance into that interior world, while the landscape painting at the opposite end of the gallery suggests a return to the world outside.

The figure’s movement across the ice is so slow that their approach is almost imperceptible, stretching a single moment into a prolonged passage. When they finally reach the viewer and remove their face, they surrender the recognizable identities that organize the self, including our roles, defenses, histories, and ideas about who we are. What remains is a void, but I do not think of it as an absence. It is an opening into the unknown and the beginning of the figure’s transformation.

The liquid that stains the gown is connected to nigredo, the alchemical stage in which matter is broken down before it can assume another form. Within the larger body of work, the figure appears through eight different masks, each representing a self we may have inhabited, performed, inherited, or encountered in another person. As the darkness spreads from one figure to the next, those identities begin to dissolve, revealing that none of them is permanent.

The figure is all of us at the moment when a familiar version of the self begins to fall away. Their role is to lead the viewer into the exhibition while establishing its central proposition: transformation becomes possible when we loosen our attachment to who we believe ourselves to be.

The exhibition’s darkness, motion-activated photographs, and gradual revelations made it difficult to consume the work quickly or capture it with a phone. Rather than documenting the experience, viewers were asked to move through it. What interested you about creating conditions that prioritize presence over capture?
I was interested in how documentation changes the way we inhabit an experience. The camera brings a future audience into the present moment, and our attention begins moving between what we are experiencing and how we are framing it for later. Because reaching for a phone has become so instinctive, that shift often happens without our awareness. I was also thinking about what that does to storytelling. When an image supplies every detail, there is less need to remember, embellish, or rebuild the experience through language.

The room became an obstacle to that reflex. A phone screen made its user suddenly conspicuous in the darkness, while the photographs themselves could only be seen by bringing your body close enough to wake them. There was no position from which the exhibition could be taken in as a whole, and the darkness made it difficult to capture beyond the physical experience.

I wanted the visitor to experience attention as physical: approaching, waiting, losing sight of what had just been visible, and deciding where to go next. The installation grew from my images, but it wasn’t asking viewers to understand my memories. It was creating enough stillness around those images for their own associations to emerge.

 Writing appears to be a foundational part of your practice rather than something that arrives after the work is made. How does writing help you during the making process?
Writing lets me move through an idea before I know what kind of object, image, or experience it might become. I begin with fragments, stream-of-consciousness pages, or small narratives, and the language usually circles the subject rather than naming it right away. Through repetition and association, the work eventually finds its shape.

With Dust from the Devil’s Tongue, I was writing in spirals that gradually became drawings of voids, while the darkroom was teaching me to think through darkness, delay, and emergence. Neither activity illustrated the other; they were parallel ways of approaching something I hadn’t yet understood. Eventually they converged in the installation.

That movement between forms is important to me because an idea changes as soon as it enters a material. Writing can expose a connection, but a photograph, performance, or built object will complicate it in a different way. I keep writing throughout the process so the work remains a conversation rather than becoming the execution of a conclusion I reached too early.

You’ve spoken about being intentionally drawn toward situations or places where you feel somewhat unprepared and must discover solutions as you go. Throughout your practice, uncertainty seems to function less as an obstacle and more as a generative working condition. What becomes possible when you allow yourself to make work without knowing where the process will lead?
Working this way has taught me to trust that I can enter a place without a fixed plan and find my way into the work. Sometimes lacking the tools or materials I expect leads to much more interesting solutions. It keeps me responsive to the place I am in, the people around me, and whatever is holding my attention at that moment. I would rather leave room for those influences than arrive with a project that has already been completely decided.

I have also become less concerned with maintaining a cohesive aesthetic. There is a lot of pressure to make an art practice easily recognizable and to approach it with the efficiency of a business or brand. My work changes with the circumstances in which it is made. Some projects are colorful, public, and participatory, while others are quiet and deeply internal. The connection between them comes from my process and the questions I return to, not from making everything look the same.

Moving between residencies has also made me comfortable with creating work that is temporary. I travel lightly, and many projects are dismantled or destroyed when a residency ends. This removes the pressure to preserve every object and gives me more freedom to fully pursue an idea while it is alive.

I am especially fond of work that no longer exists. Because I cannot return to the physical object, my understanding of it continues to change, and parts of it often reappear in later projects without being deliberately carried forward. Beginning again is simply part of continuing.

Thank you so much for sharing your work and talking with us!

To find out more about Sadie and their work, check out their website.