Thirty-five years ago, I picked up a piece of wire and never put it down.
What began as a classroom exercise, guided by my public school art teacher, Ms. D, became a revelation—a simple lesson in bending wire into figures ignited a lifelong practice. That day, I returned home and stripped my house of every spiral-bound notebook I could find and unspooled the wire bindings.
That pile of harvested metal soon became my first sculpture and something much more: It became my survival! As a queer, neurodivergent, and physically disabled child, I had grown accustomed to being told that I was abnormal, tasting the sting of humiliation, and the isolation of being perceived as “too different” to be understood. But in wire, I found a material unconventional as myself—fluid, ungoverned, and resistant to easy categorization. It was validation.
In its fluid unrestrained form, I could create freely. In wire, I had the freedom to be wholly, unapologetically myself—it bent, it adapted, it yielded; it allowed me to carve out a space that was entirely my own.
- Joshua Ramirez - Noah James Saunders
Noah James Saunders - b. 1980 Atlanta Georgia
Noah James Saunders has lived and worked in Athens GA as a full time artist for the past twenty five years. His sculptures have traveled far - exhibited as a finalist in the global Luxembourg Prize arts competition, in various museums and galleries, and most recently at the New Creature Comfort Brewery in Los Angeles, where he was its first artist in residence, at the Gloria Delson Contemporary Arts gallery in Downtown Los Angeles, and recently had his first solo museum art show at the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art.