This body of work considers how our contemporary lives are shaped through digital and cultural discourse. Using nautical motifs, the work explores ideas of resilience, interconnection and the shifting boundaries between resistance and survival. Themes of place, agency and structure reveal the tensions of transparency and manipulation, fleetingness and permanence, shame and trust.
At the center of these pieces is the meditation on how we intertwine ourselves in space that is ever evolving through political imaginations and consumerism. As these pressures unfold within the contemporary media environment, the endless stream of content competes for attention and authority. In its wake, social media functions simultaneously as a space of connection, amplification, fragmentation, and distortion, shaping the ways younger generations perceive themselves and the world around them.
The work reflects on the difficulty of locating clarity within this constant flow of information, while also examining the uneasy balance between exposure and engagement in digital spaces. Rather than offering fixed conclusions, the exhibition lingers in contradiction, often opting in the answer that there is not one correct solution.
Through layered visual language and symbolic references, the work displays the dissonance between the vast, impersonal systems that structure contemporary life and the deeply personal ways individuals attempt to navigate them, asking what it means to remain grounded while moving through environments that feel increasingly fluid, unstable, and ephemeral.
Whispers on the Sea, 2025
Oil on unstretched canvas
60” x 46”
When I began this piece it started as the idea of someone sitting incorrectly at a dinner table. A silent rebellion or possibly a sign of being comfortable within a space. How the “same” can mean completely different things. The idea of creating a space to iron out those differences and how we cannot rip functionality out of physical objects like a table. A table will always function as something: A thing will always have purpose.
We run through tangents until we realise that the loudness of warring interpretations gets us lost in our ways. The runoff sentences that we created have redirected our attention so much that we struggle to understand what is fact. Although, through that spiral, there is always a way to get ourselves to recognize our surroundings once again, and pull us back to the center of our reality. Somehow we are lured by the whispers on the sea.
You Can’t Be a Pirate With All of Your Parts, 2025
Oil on unstretched canvas and net
20” x 168’’
This is an invitation to invade this painting’s personal space. Do not allow it to ignore your presence. It’s an homage to our ability to hold out a hand and create connection.
I was listening to Sea Shanties as one does when creating paintings that they want to lightly connect to the idea of piracy. I stumbled upon a song by The Fisherman’s Friends called “Being a Pirate” and it truly made sense that you simply cannot be a pirate with all of your parts. A piece of you yields but then you’ve earned the title.
We Will Die on This Hill, 2025
Oil on unstretched canvas and thread
30” x 49”
Our hands idle.
In our laps.
Let me sincerely say, kindly leave.
Why talk to us about the climb?
How we walked the incline, stood looking at the views
Wondering what could.
Has anyone ever said anger is the right way to express the grief of being tired?
There is No “X”, 2025
Oil on unstretched canvas
49” x 30”
This piece explores the obsessive culture of there being a treasure trove that we are looking for. A big shiny chest that holds a fix-all miracle. Creating this painting and working through the pieces of the fabric and the background, I’ve always felt that the literal imagery is missing something. A lacklust to the imagery itself. The absence of information became more important. The strings that attached themselves to our walls and cast shadows upon painted surfaces creating physical layers rather than perceived layers. As our perceptions of our reality is constantly in tandem with what we know and what we don’t.
The One That Actually Pictures Something Resembling the Idea of the Pirate., 2026
Oil on Canvas
24” x 60”
Thinking through how simple means of life have become a lot harder to obtain. Wanting the white picket fenced house, that’s warm with memories. Just the thought of it feels like we are asking for the map of hidden treasure. To yearn for something that’s been achieved by the people before us, or at least that’s what we’ve been told. The resurgence of going back to the ways things were when the systems were put in place when they were first introduced. Because the only reason why the system isn’t producing the outcome that’s been promised is because we’ve strayed too far from the boats. Life savers promise us we will live. I hope we begin to adventure past what we’ve known. The risk of dreaming.
It’s Like the Worm Didn’t See it Coming,2026
Oil on Cavas
35” x 30”
We cling to the trees. Our first love,
taught us how to stay grounded.
How to listen to the climate around us
To sway,
To shed our leaves in change.
To remember the sound of their hairs rustling in the time of need.
Creating ease, and
Our own volition.
Our comprehension of the delicate lattice
Of roots and branches.
Only hiccuped by the idea of us;
Hiccuped by the idea of it.
The bait.
It’s like the worm didn’t see it coming.
Who’s to say,
The bait of consumption
Isn’t welcomed.
Who Let God on the Line?, 2026
Oil on canvas
50” x 31”
Last Friday night,
Jenny and I were on the phone.
We got to talking about how oranges are how the pirates survived long voyages. How Jonah hates the color orange but Jenny loves it. How oranges are perceived so romantically by the poets. How Wendy Cope had the right idea. To the orange of a shell on her white wicker vanity. How it once lived at the bottom of the ocean and they used to believe that mermaids talked through them. How her tail would be orange, yours would be blue. How if there were mermaids talking, just like they were talking, right now. To how you place one close to your ear and you’d never be far from home. Far from the idea that life swallows you whole,
Like how that whale did in the Bible.
Who let God on the line?
The Ropes, 2024
Oil on Canvas
37” x 46”
Braiding hair has many different cultural ties. We begin intertwining and weaving hair together to create, simply, a more functional hairstyle. However, it became a way for women through generations to teach one another a whisper of their own past, and their mothers past, and their grandmother’s past. As each generation shows us the ropes. There is trust built between us through the act of braiding each other’s hair.
Inheritance of culture is our systematic building blocks. There is strength in the way we’ve been woven into the systems around us.
Sabrina McCranels 