Sarah Kabot and Marianne Desmarais' Long-Time Collaboration Shines A Light on Medical Waste
Sarah Kabot and Marianne Desmarais, Double Loop, Installation view at the Cleveland Clinic. Photo credit: Joseph Minek.
Sarah Kabot (Fiber ’02) and Marianne Desmarias’s (Architecture ’02) decades-long collaboration began during their time at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Desmarais answered an ad Kabot placed requesting to ‘invade’ a fellow students’ studio space with the goal of finding new ways to see common objects. Kabot created a book after cataloging the items in Desmarais’ studio.
After graduating, the two continued collaborating through exquisite-corpse-style collage exchanges. Their first large project was a 2014 commission to create a sculpture to hang above an entry at Westin Hotel in downtown Cleveland.
Most recently, Kabot and Desmarais won a commission through Cleveland Clinic’s Art Program that called for a reimagining of medical waste that had expired and could not be donated. The piece, Double Loop, is an installation fabricated from hundreds of pounds of plastic tubing and valves from intravenous (IV) kits. Double Loop’s effortless, textile suspension reflects light from wall-to-wall windows in an atrium at the Stanley Shalom Zielony Institute for Nursing Excellence.
