Sarah-Lourdes Abrahamsen’s Drug Dreams uses photographs and text to visualize the artist’s fraught and ongoing journey from addiction to sobriety.

2020 exacted a profound psychological toll. Managing the tightly-wound anxieties fueled by a global health crisis, quarantine, and concerns for our families’ health and our own stretched our emotional fiber to its limit. For those grappling with addiction and substance abuse disorder, the challenges were all the more acute. A July 17th CNN report indicates that 93,000 Americans succumbed to drug overdoses in 2020, a 29.4% increase over 2019, the highest number ever reported.

Sarah-Lourdes Abrahamsen is one of millions of Americans who battled addiction last year, leaning into her photographic practice to make sense of the struggle and to honor sobriety’s hard-fought milestones. Named for the vivid dreams that may occur as addiction’s morbid grip loosens, the series Drug Dreams recounts her experience. Hastily composed text and images - some sharply focused and others blurry - uncannily mirror a mind free of, or marinating in intoxicants.

I met Abrahamesen in a recent portfolio review for Parsons School of Design. Over email and Zoom, our conversation delved further into the relationship between image and text, the human cost of the war on drugs, and how a creative practice supports sobriety.

Roula Seikay in conversation with Sarah-Lourdes Abrahamsen