Sarah Desmarais, Cubist Head 3, 2024

- Mixed media collage: paper, graphite, and paint. Framed in oak with UV-resistant plexiglass.

- Sarah Desmarais works in a variety of media including oil paint, collage and gouache. Her compositions are developed slowly, both in the studio and in the landscape, often using collage to play with novel arrangements of pattern, colour and texture. She loves the role of accident, serendipity and happenstance in the making process, considering her materials and surroundings as very active collaborators in the creation of the finished work.

- Sarah trained as a fine art painter at Central School of Art in London, before moving to rural Provence, where she focused on landscape painting, working en plein air and in a variety of media. Over the next ten years in France, her work– initially a figurative response to particular places– became progressively more abstract, and derived from an internal world of dreamlike landscape imagery, often dominated by the sea.

- Sarah now lives in a small town on the south coast of England, where the tides, fishing boats and weathered coastal environment continue to inspire her. She is represented by galleries in the UK and the US. In parallel with her fine art practice, she has pursued an interest in the community arts. In 2016, she gained a PhD from University of the Arts London, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, for research into the therapeutic uses of creative groups, and has facilitated arts-for-health groups in a variety of settings. She was recently a recipient of funding from the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Fund for a month-long printmaking residency in Venice. Landscape continues to be central to Sarah’s practice as an artist. She makes frequent trips to remote coastal locations in the UK, the US and the Balearic Islands to walk and draw.