Current
13.10 – 27.10 2026
SaraNoa Mark :Permission to Forget
3-5 Swallow Street Project Space
SaraNoa Mark. Seeing Color With My Eyes Closed [2025]
In their first solo exhibition with the gallery, Permission to Forget, New York-based artist SaraNoa Mark presents 16 sculptures, including nine works in pulped paper made this year during a residency with Dieu Donné, Brooklyn. Dense replication of motifs, asymmetry, and irregular forms lend Mark’s sculpture a fragmentary quality, neither complete nor unfinished, they take on a liminality that speaks to the process of recording history as well as our impulse to bear witness. As the exhibition’s title suggests, the artist’s work engages with the anxieties of memory: notions of what is recorded and what is left out; what fades and what retains a permanence.
SaraNoa Mark. Seeing Color With My Eyes Closed [2025]
The slippages between presence and absence play out across the surfaces of Mark’s work. Working in relief, the artist simultaneously subtracts from and adds to their material; the voluminous dimensionality of the work is heightened by the excisions the artist makes in an archival exercise of recording presence through absence. Mark’s practice maps traces – both literal and intangible. Their work records accumulations and gestures, invigorating their surfaces through a repetition of carving and scoring. Time is elongated in their work, as the sculptures evolve through a multi-layered process of observation, drawing, moulding, setting, and continual mark-making. Rejecting staticity, Mark’s work acts as record but also as platform through which the artist can reshape what is observed and transact an exchange between material and form. Mark-making is a method of transmission, where materials evolve into conduits for memory, offering potentialities for the future, as well as witnessing that which is past.
The Works
17
SaraNoa Mark
Stories I told the Earth
2026
Carved clay
SaraNoa Mark
Time Signature
2026
Carved clay
SaraNoa Mark
Unknown Hours
2026
Carved clay
SaraNoa Mark
Neighbors Names Unknown
2025
Carved clay
SaraNoa Mark
A Prophecy
2026
Carved clay
SaraNoa Mark
Transcribing the Wind
2025
Carved clay
SaraNoa Mark
Seeing Color With My Eyes Closed
2025
Carved clay with oxide
SaraNoa Mark
Petrichor
2026
Cast paper pulp
SaraNoa Mark
End of Endlessness
2026
Cast paper pulp
SaraNoa Mark
Drawn from memory
2026
Cast paper pulp
SaraNoa Mark
Renderings of Removal
2026
Carved cast paper pulp
SaraNoa Mark
To The Place Where Rivers Flow
2026
Carved cast paper pulp
SaraNoa Mark
Finite / Forever
2026
Cast paper pulp
SaraNoa Mark
Finite / Forever
2026
Cast paper pulp
SaraNoa Mark
Finite / Forever
2026
Cast paper pulp
SaraNoa Mark
Nocturne Notations
2026
Cast paper pulp
SaraNoa Mark
Even in the Evening
2026
Carved cast paper pulp
B. United States1991
Biography
Through delicate drawings and carved ceramic reliefs, SaraNoa Mark’s practice examines the traces left by time upon landscapes and within collective memory. Exploring themes of permanence and erasure, Mark’s work employs subtractive gestures to consider how intangible experiences might be preserved through material form. Engaging with carved languages and historical sources, from canyons and cuneiform tablets to Seljuk architecture, Assyrian palace reliefs and Talmudic manuscripts, the artist weaves these influences into artefact-like compositions that evoke archaeological fragments and imagined terrains. Working primarily with wet clay, Mark repeatedly carves and scores its surface, echoing the incremental processes through which geological strata form and landscapes are shaped over time. In this way, material becomes both medium and archive, allowing Mark to explore the enduring impulse to inscribe stories into place and the capacity of objects to carry memory across time.
Mark was born in 1991 in New York. They received a BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2015, a Fulbright Research Award in Turkey in 2019–20, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023. Mark has received numerous awards, including the Artadia Award (2023) and Harpo Foundation Grant for Visual Artists (2024). Residencies include Wave Hill, New York (2023); Yaddo, New York (2025); Dieu Donné, New York (2025); and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut (2025), with a forthcoming studio residency at the Monira Foundation, New Jersey (2026–27). Recent solo presentations include Evaporated Hours, Dreamsong, Minneapolis (2025); Two Noons, Goldfinch Gallery at NADA New York (2025); and Guarding the Past, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, Chicago (2026). Mark currently lives and works in New York.
SaraNoa Mark :Permission to Forget
13.10 - 27.10.2026
Current
Hours
Monday to Friday, 10:00am - 5:30pm
Gallery
3-5 Swallow Street, Project Space
London
W1B 4DE