Sadie Powers - Souvenir (2025)

A note from Sadie

Souvenir is a body of work consisting of 4 pieces. Between 2020 and 2022, a significant number of friends and family passed away. Due to the pandemic, funerals became impossible to travel to or just didn’t happen. How does one grieve alone? What is that language? What is that movement? What do I do with my hands, with the muscle memory of care weaving phantom thread? What is the shape of the shelter one makes to bear this loss? If I’m not holding, will I sink to the bottom?

What is my last memory with them? Almost always, it is of embrace.

I’ve had a relationship with fretless bass for about 20 years. It’s an unforgiving instrument. It exposes everything. Like porcelain: elastic, pliable, detailed, expressive. Suggestive to subtle touches. It shows the hand of the player. I began recording improvisations with silence, thinking of those I’d lost, their embraces, those moments of stillness and when time folds in on itself, then cutting the tracks up processing and layering them, a sound collage. Programmable music box bells, sheet metal, cardboard box, and field recordings from the same spot on the back patio of my former home color the shape. Like a bird collecting items to create a nest of memory. Sounds drifting in and out like recollections, like ghosts. The practice became a life raft, or a grieving raft.

Is the souvenir the embrace? Souvenirs originated from pilgrimages in the Middle Ages, as a remembrance of a journey.

What is a life raft, anyway? If you take a raft out past the waves and climb onto it, close your eyes, feel the sun heat the salt on your skin, the current will carry you down shore. Open your eyes when you no longer hear your mother’s laughter. You don’t know where you are but you do. There is only one way back. To ease down and slide your soft body under, beneath the surface and feel the tug towards home. It only looks still from above.