About

Sarah "Gigi" Konecki-Brazeal is a graduate student in art history at Arizona State University whose research and studio practice are unified by a single preoccupation: the body as a site of meaning-making across time. Her thesis examines ancient Egyptian tattooing, from the predynastic Gebelein mummies through the Middle Kingdom, deploying Alfred Gell's framework of art as social agency to argue that tattooing has not merely been overlooked but structurally excluded from art history's canonical frameworks, an exclusion she identifies as a colonial inheritance. Her broader scholarly aim is to investigate how ancient humans used the body as a site of devotion, ritual, and culture, and to build an art-historical methodology adequate to see it.

Konecki-Brazeal is an active member of the Antiochia ad Cragum Archaeological Research Project in Gazipaşa, Turkey, where she serves as field assistant and trench supervisor, and a member of the Bandafassi Regional Archaeological Project at ASU, where she works in the lithics lab and produces academic illustrations. Her fieldwork informs her studio practice directly: stratigraphy, material, and the physical record of human habitation all find their way into her textile and sculptural work. She is also available for archaeological illustration on a contract basis.

Artist Statement

My studio art practice begins with a question I first encountered not in a library but in a tattoo studio: what does it mean to mark a body with intention? As a former tattooer, I worked with some clients who sought the needle for reasons that had nothing to do with aesthetics: for grief, for devotion, for cultural continuity, for the need to make something permanent on a body that felt otherwise impermanent. That experience is the epistemological root of everything I have done since, in the archive and in the studio alike.

What I found in the ancient record is what I already knew from practice. Tattooing is not decoration. It is inscription, a deliberate, permanent commitment to a belief, a community, or a cosmology, made on the most irreplaceable surface available. My textile work is a continuation of that inquiry by other means. Stitching, weaving, and wrapping are inscriptions too: slower, more accumulated, but governed by the same logic. The needle and the loom are not as far apart as they appear.

I use fiber, metal, and organic plant matter chosen for their deep entanglement with human making across time and place. Textile making is among the oldest technologies available to us, and to work within it is to participate in a continuity of craft knowledge that predates recorded history. My fieldwork as a student of archaeology shapes this directly: stratigraphy, the way time and human activity deposit themselves in legible layers, has become a formal influence, with some compositions drawn explicitly from field drawings of my trench sections. The desert Southwest, its soil, its light, its long human habitation, is the landscape that grounds all of it.

The siting of work is integral to my practice. Work made in dialogue with a place belongs to that place. My most intentional gesture as an artist is often the act of leaving: weaving onto immovable structures in the landscape, placing objects in the sites that generated them, allowing work to weather and return. This too is a form of devotion and a direct echo of the ancient practices I study. The mark endures. The body it was made for does not. What remains is the evidence of someone's commitment to meaning.