The title, Echoes & Emergence, reflects an essential rhythm in my practice, the continual dialogue between past and present, between memory and transformation. The “echoes” are the reverberations of personal history, ancestral influences, and the fragments of experience that have shaped my sensibilities as an artist. These are not passive recollections; they are active presences, resonating through material choices, compositional structures, and the layered surfaces of my work.

To work with echoes is to listen. It is to recognize the ways the past informs the present—sometimes as an inheritance, sometimes as a burden. My process often begins with this listening, sifting through the residue of earlier lives: ephemera, textures, paper worn by time. Within these remnants lie both pain and possibility, the shadows of wounds and the light of formative joys.

The act of emergence is, by contrast, forward-moving. It is the slow, deliberate unfolding toward a self that is not fixed but in constant becoming. In the studio, emergence takes form through gestural marks that break free from strict boundaries, through compositional shifts that lean toward openness, and through the willingness to leave certain spaces unresolved. If echoes are what anchor me, emergence is what carries me into the unknown.

Seen together, “echoes” and “emergence” articulate a duality that is both deeply personal and universally human: the necessity of acknowledging where we come from while also allowing ourselves to evolve beyond it. My work does not seek to erase the past, nor does it allow it to dictate the present. Instead, it creates a space where histories, both lived and inherited, can be examined, honored, and transformed.

For me, Echoes & Emergence is not simply a title but a lens, a way of understanding the arc of my own becoming. It is a reminder that growth is not a departure from the past but an integration of it, that emergence can only happen when we have listened closely to the echoes that brought us here.

Robin Jack Sarner