I Stay, in Pieces is a quiet, persistent meditation on what it means for the artist to remain; within herself, and within the fragile momentum of daily life. In this new body of work, Sarah Abu Abdullah turns to the materials and gestures that have long shaped her visual language, approaching them with a softened urgency that lets repetition become both a method and a meaning. The works echo one another: familiar mediums recur, motifs resurface, and forms repeat, yet never identically. Each piece is a variation, a fracture, a slight shift in tone or pressure. Together, they form an amalgamation of fragments that reflect the artist’s attempt to understand the act of staying, piece by piece.
The exhibition namesake suggests this duality. “I Stay” suggests endurance, a simple, and in some cases a stubborn insistence on presence. “In Pieces” acknowledges the fractured, nonlinear ways such endurance manifests. For Abu Abdullah, staying is not a dramatic act; it is a daily negotiation, a commitment to keep going even when clarity is absent. Peace is not a destination here, rather it is a practice, provisional and porous, found in the slow labor of making and remaking.
Across the exhibition, a constellation of motifs emerge, recurrent shapes, familiar imagery, repeated gestures and themes that mirror the flow of lived experience. These fragments gather not as isolated components but as a larger, interlinked system: objects that speak to one another, echoing patterns of thought, memory, and emotional endurance. The assembly of works becomes its own quiet ecosystem, in which repetition reveals resilience and accumulation becomes a metaphor for life itself. Each element, modest on its own, gains meaning in relation to the others, forming a collective portrait of continuity stitched together from deliberate, patient fragments.
I Stay, in Pieces ultimately offers a portrait of the artist finding ways to sustain herself through the everyday. It reflects a version of peace that is less about serenity and more about buoyancy: keeping one’s head above water, staying afloat amid the unremarkable pressures of daily life. In embracing the imperfect, the repetitive, and the unresolved, Abu Abdullah renders staying, simply staying, an act of both endurance and grace.
