Into The Void Painting by Sara Roberts

Sara Roberts graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) in Printmedia in 2011 and finished her Masters of Fine Arts in Painting at Sydney College of the Arts in 2016. Exploring ideas of personal and cultural identity and one’s sense of belonging within a place, she draws inspiration from her experience of living in between countries and relocating many times in her life. Born in Australia and having grown up in Mexico, France, Sweden and Poland, the feeling of being foreign in an unfamiliar land was an influential one. Recently Roberts moved to a small coastal town outside of Sydney, Shoalhaven Heads. Daily events and phenomena from her life and from the world that surrounds her become the starting point for her new series of work. Roberts’ paintings embrace the dualities such as inside and outside, lightness and heaviness, illusion and reality. They float between the abstract and the figurative, creating a window onto the outside world, which is both familiar and mysterious. The surface of the canvas evokes a psychological state of mind and a prolonged examination into recording her own reactions to the natural world. Specifically, she probes the capabilities of the landscape as an exploratory site. Painted from memory she returns to the canvas again and again, and the work develops over time; painting, then erasing and sanding off the oil paint and starting all over until she captures a certain rendition of light. Throughout the process, the surface develops layers and scars. For Roberts, the landscape is merely the means to another end with deep meditations on memory and loss, figurative and abstraction as the starting point. Her paintings evoke a psychological state of mind, dealing with the potential that lies within the paint but also the combination of memories, a sense of place in the environment and the questioning of where we belong.