Sarah Desmarais, Rose Archipelago

- Collage housed in an antique 19th-century gilt frame with UV-protectant plexiglass.

- Sarah Desmarais trained as a fine art painter at Central School of Art in London, before moving in the 1990s to rural Provence, where she focused on landscape painting, working en plein air and in a variety of media including oil paint, watercolor, collage and etching. Over the next ten years, her work— initially a figurative response to particular places, became progressively more abstract, and derived from an internal world of dreamlike landscape imagery.

After a decade in France, Sarah returned to the UK, and has continued to show her work in London and Paris. 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. She was recently a recipient of funding from the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Fund. Other recent projects include diverse community-based arts-for-health initiatives, a post-doctoral research post with the National Alliance for Museums, Health and Wellbeing at University College London, and funded residencies with Bow Arts, the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture at Middlesex University, and Climate Art UK. She currently supervises post-graduate research as a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London.

Landscape continues to be central to Sarah’s practice as a painter. She makes frequent trips to remote coastal locations in the UK and the Mediterranean to walk and draw, working regularly as artist in residence at Ventnor Botanic Garden on the southern coast of the Isle of Wight. She currently lives between London and Rye, a medieval citadel on the south coast of England, where the tides, fishing boats and weathered coastal environment continue to inspire her.