Dated sometimes to the day, these mixed-media drawings, made between 1998 – 2004, provide a profound and intimate look into Sterne’s final years of making art while coping with the onset of near total blindness. By noting that they could be viewed in any direction, Sterne refused to allow the image to fully crystallize, forcing the viewer to share the same disorienting perspective as her own. Hazy washes of smudged pastel pierced with the deliberateness of a scrawled graphite line define these intensely personal drawings, in which one feels every mark of the artist’s hand. Details of her physical surrounding such as the frame of a window or a view from her garden are fused with personal recollections into elusive, unearthly depictions of her inner ruminations as reconciled with the greater world around her.
