Sarah Courville

photograph by Pedro Damasceno

Interview by Uma Halsted

How did your time in Berlin shape your art?

I really didn’t start collaging until I got to Germany. I guess the winter came, and I had to figure out a coping mechanism or a way to kind of track my mental, physical, and emotional health, channel it into something. And in Germany in the winter, the sun sets at like 3:45 p, so everyone lives mostly in darkness, indoors. My collaging was totally shaped by being in Berlin. There are lots of these secondhand bookstores in the city that sell old magazines, books, newspapers, and the like. I picked up a couple things at one of these shops, just because I like images and old things. Then I began thinking about the images and texts through a different lens and found that it was a good channel to develop my creative thoughts.

Do you think that exploring the body in your work is an act of giving yourself back control of the body?

Totally. It’s the same reason I like having tattoos on my body. When you exist in a body that you can’t control -- and me it’s like ninety percent of the time I can’t control it -- you are forced to seek agency in other ways. And I’m attracted to images of the body. So a lot of the magazines and things that I’ve collected over years have to do with the body in some way. I have old Playboy magazines, and I have amazing German magazines on Freikörperkultur [free body culture], books on body language, anatomy.