sarah payton

“Speak this yearning”

Coverall, reading table and conversations

I was struck by the depths of longing in many of us … The shared space and feeling of ‘yearning’ opens up the possibility of common ground… It seemed appropriate then to speak this yearning. _Bell Hooks 1991

Speak this Yearning brings three individual works that intersect tangentially around issues of care, power and social change. The work explores the longing for community and the potential for moving toward the collective. Across performance, gesture, and conceptual inquiry, the works explore the fragile space between individual action and shared responsibility, asking how intimacy, maintenance, and persistence might become sites of resistance and possibility.

The proposal takes its title from bell hooks’ writing on yearning as a shared social and political affect. For hooks, longing opens the potential for common ground: a space where private desire becomes collective imagination. In this context, yearning is understood as a generative force that reveals both the ache of separation and the hope of solidarity.

2025

“Performing Love” (stairs)

Performance

“Performing Love” revisits and re-enacts the late 1960s Maintenance Art performances of Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Ukeles’ work radically repositioned acts of maintenance, taking cleaning, caring, repairing, sustaining, as artistic and political gestures. By returning to these performances in the present moment, Payton reflects on the continued invisibility of reproductive labour and asks what it means to perform care within contemporary systems shaped by exhaustion, precarity, and unequal distributions of responsibility. Re-enactment Ukeles becomes an homage and also an attempt to inhabit the tension between devotion and obligation, love and labour.

“The impossibility of maintaining a line” is a conceptual work reflecting on effort, obstruction and desire.

In foregrounding care as both burden and possibility, the artist asks how we might continue to sustain one another and what forms of community can emerge through the shared experience of longing.

2025