Gone to Seed (next year) 01

Sara paints with very gestural mark making, and this painting is part of her new body of work which expresses Sara’s thoughts about nature, the environment and mankind. It is painted on paper using earth pigment paints which Sara has foraged from coasts and hills in South West England. Sara comments,

“It’s a bit more spare than most of the layered earth pigment paintings I’ve been making, but I feel it is absolutely complete and says everything it needs to say as it is. I’m really liking the lightness of being of these strange, almost undersea-type tree-like forms – and everything they articulate about our precarious plantlife right now.”

These paintings bring us into uncompromising proximity with the earth. Created using paints made with earth pigments foraged locally and from across the SW of England, these paintings echo the annual cycles of plant growth and the deep layers and cycles of geological time. Painted in the tradition of botanical art, these interpretations of food plants, including roots, become curious specimens, intended to document and archive species. Appearing as underwater forests, the fundamental life-giving relationship between earth and water is suggested here.

These paintings take as their subject, lettuce and cauliflower plants which have been left to go to seed in Sara’s own vegetable garden. These humble subjects communicate the close relationship of the artist with her garden and her attitude towards self-sufficiency, sustainable relationships with food and the environment more broadly.

Currently the work is priced as unframed, to allow ease of transport. We have shown how it could look in a dark wood frame as a suggestion. Once framed, you should allow for a wall space of at least 170 x 120 cm.

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Additional information

Medium

Earth pigments on paper

Year

2022

Original / Edition

Original work of art

Size

150 x 100 cm

Description

Contemporary painterly qualities and drawn marks are essential components in Sara Dudman’s work, conveying an intuitive understanding of her subject, capturing, analysing and representing their movements or properties. Fragility and transience are expressed through unpainted or sparsely formed negative spaces. Through the process of drawing and painting she progressively locates and extracts order from apparent chaos, drawing out patterns of movement and behaviour. Small-scale and intimate, or large and expressive, these gestural paintings are created in layers, alternately recording and expressing the essence of the subject and its environment or context.

Using the personal and interpretive possibilities of drawing and painting, yet derived from the immediacy and documentation of video, Sara’s works reinterpret perceptions of landscape, activity and the elements at play upon it. The works have their own voice and speak of environment and relationships with places. Traces of the layering process revealed within the works assert the primary importance of paint itself as a contributor to the creation and realisation of each work.

Sara has a BA (Hons) Fine Art: Painting, Loughborough College of Art and Design and an MA (distinction) Design and Manufacture, De Montfort University, Leicester.  She was elected an academician at the Royal West of England Academy of Art in 2016. She has exhibited widely including The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and The Jerwood Drawing Prize.  Sara has been selected for artist residencies in remote locations including Italy, Cornwall and Northumberland, as well as sitting on the judging panel for national art awards and exhibitions.

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