'It's OK to Feel This': Mantra Inspires Mixed-Media Artist to Create Meditative Portraiture

THIS SATURDAY, LANECIA Rouse Tinsley Gallery presents It’s OK To Feel This, a solo exhibition by Houston multi-disciplinary artist Sarah Fisher, whose work explores portraiture through painting, collage, printmaking, installation and sculpture.

Perhaps best known for her mixed-media portraits of friends, famous figures, and herself created out of hundreds of gold, dry-cleaning identification stickers, some of which appear in poet Robin Davidson’s book Mrs. Schmetterling, Fisher states on her website: “I record the human need to be authentically seen.” (Note: A beautiful painting of a guardian-like horse is included the exhibit. Animals need to be seen too!) The show’s title comes from a majestic self-portrait realized in carved wood, a complex composition of archetypical shapes and ideographic writing evoking the iconography of European and African spiritual practices.

Fisher is a member of the G5 Collective, a Houston-based artist collective co-founded in 2020 by University of Houston MFA graduates Liz Gates and Doug Welsh. Welsh is the curator of It’s OK To Feel This, and in a statement, cites meditation teacher and author Joseph Goldstein as one of Fisher’s key influences. “His mantra ‘It’s okay to feel this,’ has become a tool Fisher repeats in her mind during particularly challenging moments,” Welsh writes. “Through her work as a multidisciplinary artist and mindfulness student, Fisher is learning to sit with all feelings, no matter how difficult, and gently let them go.”

Housed within Holy Family HTX Episcopal Church, Lanecia Rouse Tinsley Gallery is the ideal space for Fisher’s psychologically and spiritually informed art making. In 2022, its inaugural year, the gallery exhibited an impressive range of some of Houston’s most talented artists — including Matt Manalo, Bruce Herman, Anthony Suber and Sara Triana — and presented the first of annual shows of the Holy Family HTX Artists’ Collective. It’s Okay To Feel This is on view Feb. 17 through Mar. 22, 2024.

'It's OK to Feel This'