Lewes poet priest and abstract artist find hope in hares

Lewes fiber artist Sarah Pavlik was whapping a huge piece of fabric with a stick when the hare revealed itself to her. 

“A minimal amount of slapping this stick around (that had been dipped in) thickened dye could create a really expressive image,” she explained.

If it sounds abstract, that was the intention. And yet, like a Rorschach inkblot test, a figure could be found in the avant-garde splatters: a hare.

Unlike rabbits, hares live independently or in pairs. They are born with fur and their eyes open, already prepared for a life of solitary survival. Fascinated by these creatures, Pavlik dyed hare after hare into fabric until her house was full of them.

When poet and printmaker Mark Harris visited Pavlik’s home, he saw the hares for what they were: symbols of hope. 

“I began to think of (the hare) as being an image of hope that’s not tied down to a specific ideology. ‘I’m going to go out and romp in the field and have more babies. Life is going to go on. I’m going to get eaten by a wolf, but that’s alright. My cousins are going to live,’” he said.

This motif served as inspiration for Pavlik and Harris’ first collaborative art exhibit, “Of Hares and Hope,” showing at Rehoboth Art League through Nov. 1.

The artists were mere acquaintances until early 2025, when Pavlik moved into a vacant studio neighboring Harris’ on the second floor of the Lewes post office. 

As the pair spent their days whittling away on individual projects in the century-old building, they often wandered into each other’s studios to bounce ideas off each other. Thus, their artistic partnership was born.

Instead of working side-by-side on art projects, Pavlik and Harris riffed off each other’s work like jazz musicians.

For example, while Pavlik was undergoing a residency in Puebla, Mexico, in March, she captured the lines and patterns of sidewalks by dipping fabrics in pigmented soy milk and laying them out on the ground. She titled the series “Where We Walk.”

In response, Harris printed an original poem on one of the fabrics Pavlik brought home: “Where we walk becomes the way home. On that path, we are sister to the wild cat, brother to the mouse, father to the carrion crow, mother to new worlds, flames of hope.”

He then printed linocuts of each of the creatures from the poem, which represent qualities essential to surviving the journey called life: fierceness, kindness, tenacity, creativity and hope.

After that, Pavlik surprised Harris by painting a 5-by-4-foot mouse. Hidden in its blue fur are Harris’ linocuts and words from his poem.

“It was hilarious, because Mark comes in one day, and he sees it, and he’s just like, ‘Whoa!’” Pavlik said with a laugh.

In this way, Pavlik and Harris have remixed each other’s work for the past year and a half. 

“I often talk about it as playing ball. … We don’t do anything that isn’t fun,” Pavlik said. “Just the other day, Mark took a bunch of eggshells, and he glued them on this substrate. He’s going to print something on these crumbled eggshells.”

The pair haven’t had a single argument throughout their collaboration, despite the fact that their artistic practices are so different.

Pavlik is a former high school psychology teacher and counselor who revels in the abstract. 

“I do not make art for any other reason than to find beauty in shape and line and color,” she said. 

Harris, on the other hand, is a retired Episcopal priest who embraced printmaking as a form of political activism about 20 years ago. 

As such, his work always has a message, whether he’s depicting the Biblical Rachel “weeping for children who have been killed by a foreign adversary” — a commentary on the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict — or memorializing the over 1 million American lives lost to COVID-19 by stamping the Roman numeral “M” 1,000 times on rice paper.

The artistic value of his work is secondary to the communication of ideas, Harris explained. 

“Printmaking came into existence precisely because it was a way of communicating to the masses,” he said. 

But in working with Pavlik, he’s come to appreciate art for art’s sake.

Meanwhile, Pavlik has been surprised to find herself thinking about current events while creating abstract art.

For example, she reflected on the recent news that Medicaid is rolling back coverage of gender-affirming care for transgender children as she created a patchwork of androgynous human faces called “Free to Be.” 

Pavlik has also helped Harris create more explicitly political artwork, like when she assembled and painted a 33-foot-long scroll of fabrics for Harris to print linocuts on. 

The resulting piece, “Catastrophic Decade,” is a retelling of the past 10 years in American politics, depicting in symbols the COVID pandemic, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s mass deportation efforts. 

The scroll ends with a message: “From the wilds of despair comes new life.”

A hare appearing in 2019 and 2024 represents the hope Harris had that Donald Trump would not be elected president. But Harris and Pavlik’s hare doesn’t represent one particular hope; it represents hope as a philosophy.

“The sequence is you despair about something, and then resist that, whatever that is. You have some hopes, but invariably, your hopes get dashed. … Is there any way to get out of that cycle? There is. The way out is not to be so connected to a particular hope that you’re not able to continue hoping,” Harris said. “Hope is not necessarily about you getting what you want, but somehow or another, what the journey is about.”