Everything I want to Tell you

Collaberation with Jo Pawlowska

2024-present

Everything I want to Tell You is an ongoing collaboration between Sadie Cook and Jo Pawlowska. The project began with conversations around the relationship of our bodies and the mundane fragments of our lives with the nebulous cages of class, illness, immigration, gender and sexuality. As we talked about the ripple effects of our efforts to escape these concrete definitions imposed on us, we turned to images as a means to both record and fantasize.


We started in earnest a year ago. Every week, we document our separate lives through screenshots, video clips, and photographs.  Every week, we meet to do a shoot of a shared fantasy of world built for us. Each image, whether vernacular or fantasy,  is a facet of our explorations of the limits of our own bodies as surfaces on which experiences are traced.   


We use these images and videos to build large-scale installations of thousands of pictures,  swirling explosions and clumps that trace the abrasions that form when desire rubs against a precarious life. We want for entering one of our installations to feel like entering our minds in the moments before we fall asleep. We want an audience to feel the sting of the day´s papercuts in our fingertips, the ache of effort in our muscles, and the whirl of emotions as fantasies, memories from years ago, and memories from earlier that day all seem equally real and present.


At the same time, because we have chosen skin as the main surface within our show, the chaos of bodies echoes a common refrain of disidentification as the constant process of taking oneself apart and putting oneself together.  


Our project pulls from perspectives that have been historically under-represented. We see our exhibition as a means to highlight conversations that have happened at the edges of the Icelandic art scene, while retaining the intimacy and rawness of these dialogues. Photography is our primary medium, and new media is our secondary medium. Both are spaces occupied with truth and fantasy. Both are dialogues strongly present within the immigrant and queer communities in Iceland. And, finally, both are forms of image-making that most people engage with in the universal struggle with how one is seen and sees oneself.