ELECTED ARWS 2026
Sarah decided she wanted to be an artist aged five. As a child, she loved designing maps and mazes; the sense of a painting as a world one can inhabit or walk around in is still central to her work. Post-art school she travelled and painted for six months in India, and then camped and painted half a year in a cave in Provence. Both experiences strengthened her motivation to work from immediate experience. Initially this expressed itself through landscape painting - she spent ten years in rural France before returning to the UK. Over time, she has become more interested in working about internal experience, her paintings becoming more abstract, inspired by poetry, dreams and imagination as well as the visual.
Sarah has exhibited extensively and internationally, mainly in the UK, France and the US. Concurrently, she has been involved in arts therapies, and carried out funded doctoral research into the mental health benefits of art and craft in medical and community settings. She has also been the beneficiary of a number of funded residencies, and is the recipient of a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust award.
Sarah’s current paintings explore abstract arrangements of flat colour and simple shapes and their emotional resonances. She likes gouache for its velvety, matt, flat and opaque qualities; these offer no distraction from the quiet interplay of coloured surfaces. Her work emerges from an absorbing and slightly obsessive practice involving the slow, repetitive placing of paint onto the stained and abraded surfaces of old Japanese papers, and the constant echoing of compositional elements from painting to painting. She still aspires to make paintings in which the viewer is free to wander and to dream.