About Beauty and Life and Death Painting

Sarah is a landscape artist, painting her local Sussex scenery on canvasses made from recycled domestic fabric, hence exploring the juxtaposition of the domestic and natural world. Since completing a Fine Art degree at Bath in 2000, Sarah has developed an interdisciplinary practice exploring the intersections between Painting, Photography and Film, often drawing upon personal experience and narratives. After graduating Sarah was a freelance editorial assistant photographer. Having traveled through South America and Asia, she then drew upon this experience to create a body of film and photographic work documenting these continents. She produced films exploring ideas around going on journeys and the sublime. This work was exhibited all around the world in a retrospective of British video art entitled All for Show (2005-2007), an internationally touring exhibition of short films made by British artists. Jessica Lack’s review in ID magazine in 2005 suggested ‘an awkward and macabre sense of humor […] These idiosyncratic films succeed in finding surreal quirks in the banalities of everyday life’. Around the same time, Sarah began another journey – as an arts educator. Having trained at Goldsmiths College, she taught in a number of schools eventually to become Head of Art at Eastbourne College. In 2011, she was invited to exhibit a retrospective of her work at Bedford School which was met with public acclaim. Another journey – that of motherhood and starting a family in rural Sussex has informed the content of Sarah’s current paintings.