Icarus Rising: Sarah Banks

Sarah Banks  (Silkscreen and fine cotton collage. 46" x 78") 

Seattle-based artist Sarah Banks has shared with Susan Platt a striking work in progress, inspired by the birdlike masks worn by early modern physicians to ward off the plague.  (Since miasmic odors from the afflicted were thought to transmit plague, the masks were stuffed with fragrant herbs.)

The artist explains that before the advent of the novel coronavirus crisis, she had been in the process of creating five large silkscreens as a series, exploring our contemporary plague of over-consumption, imperiling the survival of the planet, The silkscreen project was brought to a halt by the Covid-19 shutdown in Seattle. We await the return to normalcy that will allow her to complete all panels of this major series.

Sarah Banks writes, "Since all our stories have already been lived by the gods, I often start there for inspiration."  In this panel, our attention is centered on the Greek mythological figure of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and plummeted to earth.  A great winged figure, wearing a bird-peaked plague mask, floats off up into the air, just barely tethered to a small image of Sisyphus below.

Although adorned with an archaic medical mask, the large figure seems to be the pandemic itself, its outstretched wings casting all below in shadow.  (Perhaps its wings recall the nightmarish bats of Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.)  Its large sword-like weapon points down, consigning the small figures of Achilles and Hektor to endless combat in front of the walls of Troy.  At the outer edges, below the wings' tips, two small winged figures of Icarus struggle to take flight. Below the large being's feet, Sisyphus stoops and raises his heavy burden endlessly.

The small figures and the plague bird's head are silk-screened to a great cloth, upon which the body and wings of the large Icarcus plague bird are built up through layers of collage. Given the overarching theme of endless return, one reference might be to the tapestry created on Penelope's loom, which she unthreads each night to ward off the hordes of suitors as she awaits Odysseus' return, a teller of tales who must labor in secret (Perhaps, some have argued, the weaver Penelope is a coded doppelgänger of the secret woman authoress of the Odyssey!)

Although Banks conceived of the series before the Covid-19 crisis, at our present moment we may  be inclined to read the large cloth panel as a stage curtain, rising on the First Act of a drama that is not yet written  At the present instant of terror,  the great winged being,  avatar of the pandemic, seems unstoppable. Yet, perhaps the virus, like Icarus of old,  is ultimately doomed. Might the disease itself, in effect, fly too close to the sun, that greatest of disinfectants, and someday come crashing down to earth?  Our challenge then, like the Greeks of old, will be to learn from older mythic narratives of hubris--to triumph over overweening pride and plot a more sustainable pathway forward, seeking balance and survival for our planet, ourselves, and our posterity.