Cities & Desire Painting

Sarah May Hollis is a British/Chinse dancer and a painter. She works and resides in London and had received her education from the Laban School of Contemporary Dance and The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL. She often places drawings and technical drawings atop of each other to later reproduce them from memory, creating emotional and kinetic compositions in both oil and acrylic. This process allows her Abstract Expressionist works to intertwine between both dance and architecture, revealing linear patterning that dissect and connect on her canvases to express rhythmic and looping forms. ​“Painting is like dancing, a united focus of mind, body and spirit.” Additionally, these attempts of seeking connections between art, movement and architecture allow her to experiment with intricate elements of light, space and form in which she is often part of. In one of her paintings, Typhoon Euphoria (2018), she describes her relationship with the surroundings of Hong Kong, China, where she was trapped for two days in a high-rise building due to a storm that hit the city. Her painting reveals how the water became the new façade of the city’s architecture, allowing all the concrete to ‘move’ or ‘dance’ in front of her eyes. Moreover, Hollis works in both digital and physical processes to generate an understanding to our human evolving relationship with matter and identity. Her dance performances have spanned London, Barcelona, Paris, Israel and New York.