Saran Alderson gives new meaning to body-positive art

“I bow down to the beauty of the fat roll and the curl of body hair.”

That’s how Saran Alderson, “Painter, Printmaker, and Conjuror of Awesome,” introduces herself to the world on her website. That tone captures the energy and flow of Alderson, a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and current artist-in-residence at Project Row Houses (PRH).

Born in New Jersey, seasoned in California, and now based in Houston, Alderson explores beauty and abstraction through the human figure. Before exposing the human body through her art, she spent over 15 years covering it up as a fashion designer trained in New York City and Nottingham, England.

Alderson later moved to the Bayou City to attend the University of Houston, earning her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in painting and printmaking. Today, she blends her creative practice with education, dedicating half of her PRH studio space to offering printmaking classes for the community.

Mapping shapes of intimacy

At its core, Alderson’s work examines how our bodies occupy space in the world.

“I’m a painter at my heart. I’m also a printmaker,” Alderson said. “Most of my work is centered around the body… as in like how we present ourselves to the world; how people maybe see us or even misread us with how we put ourselves out there.”

Rather than just focusing on literal anatomy, Alderson translates human connection into visual forms.

“I’m really interested in moments of intimacy,” she explained. “I think about intimacy almost like a triangle where you’re leaning on each other at so many different points to kind of create a shape. So, I’m looking for these shapes of intimacy, or these common things about our bodies in our intimate spaces.”

Flipping juvenile tropes into cultural symbols

Alderson’s creative process often involves reinterpreting everyday objects into deeply relatable, bodily forms. She draws inspiration from a personal childhood longing: her ears would never pierce properly due to keloids, leaving her unable to wear the door-knocker earrings she admired on other girls.

“It is my dream one day to be able to find some clip-on door-knocker earrings so that I could participate in this ultimate symbol of brownness,” Alderson shared.

Instead, she channels that symbol into her studio practice.

“I’ll take door-knocker earrings, and I’ll draw them, and then I turn them into something,” she said. “For instance, I have this piece that I’m working on where I turn the door-knockers into saggy breasts… And I think about the terms that people use to talk about women’s breasts, like ‘knockers.’ It’s sort of making fun of these juvenile instincts that we have about the body. Like, that’s the moment of connection and intimacy where we all sort of recognize that internal joke.”

Finding community at Project Row Houses

When Alderson arrived in Houston from Los Angeles in 2020, she knew nothing about Project Row Houses. She simply knew she wanted her art practice to include a community aspect. During her university interviews, faculty introduced her to PRH and its founding history.

“I was like, ‘Okay. Note to self: When everyone stops being quarantined, I’m going to go there,’” she recalled.

Throughout graduate school, she actively looked for ways to engage with the site, volunteering for a youth-focused reading program over Spring Break, teaching at summer art camps, and running workshops.

“PRH helped me figure out what it is to even be in community with art,” Alderson stated.

Navigating the art world as a Black woman

Creating unapologetic, bodily artwork as a Black woman occasionally draws unexpected reactions.

“There is a certain amount of pearl-clutching,” Alderson noted. “There are words like, ‘Oh, you’re really going to talk about that?’ I respond, ‘Why, yes, I am.’ But for the most part, there’s been a sort of camaraderie and sisterhood that I was not expecting.”

Having grown up around fierce, strict aunts who were 1960s protestors and schoolteachers, Alderson initially anticipated a rigid art environment. Instead, she found Houston’s artistic community uniquely welcoming compared to New York or Los Angeles.

“The biggest difference in the Houston art scene compared to the rest of them is y’all are friendly here… We’re not trying to stab each other in the face in order to get there… People here are welcoming and friendly, and that is an anomaly,” said Alderson.

For artists starting their own creative journeys, Alderson shares the vital lesson she learned along the way.

“I wish someone would have told me that even when you don’t feel ready for something, you should still say yes,” Alderson shared. “Even if you have to fumble publicly, you’re still getting that experience versus not getting that experience at all.”