Blog — Sarah Poland

Hello,

Here in Wales, schools are back, it is still warm but the torrential monsoon like downpours herald autumn. The sea is also a balmy 19 degrees C.

I’ve taken up surfing. A second shot at it. I’ve bought an easier board to ride than I had before, figuring that the more I get up, the better I get and the more fun it is.

I’ve also started a vision board. I’ve never made one of these before. It has lots of sumptuous images on it but the main one I connected to and resonated with, the one my heart was with, has three women long-boarding next to each other, full of joy and sisterhood. I wanted to find a women’s surf group or retreat and to surf with women…a week later on Instagram, a local women’s weekly surf group popped up in my feed. My vision board has no digital connection. Wow! I’ve been once and CAN’T WAIT TO GO AGAIN.

Why am I telling you this? Because art is life and I fully immerse my art practice into my life and my life into my art practice. Not a lot doesn’t cross over. Ever. Surfing is an immersion in water and air. Air and Ocean.

I’m not painting landscapes in the traditional representational manner or in the oil painting style that I used to. I’m making work ‘of the landscape’, using botanical pigments and my immersion in the place and space. My living in it as it lives in me; how it feels to hear and sense the wind on your skin, the ocean on your forehead, down your body. Tthe power of the water and the quietening of the snow. To live viscerally. To live to create.

So as the BEEP Painting Prize and Biennial comes to an end, I collect Mysteries Unfold Outside Of Time and ship it to Bristol next week for it’s second outing. I’m excited to have not just one but two large 4 x 4’ paintings accepted into the RWA 169th Annual Open Exhibition. On two previous occasions I’ve had a small monotype and a large-ish lithograph accepted. This is a milestone. Two at once and they’re taking up some space!

Royal West Of England Academy 169th Annual Open Exhibition 8 Oct 2022 - 8 Jan 2023

It’s also exciting because this is my new work which has been accepted into BEEP and the RWA. It takes some courage to change your work, to leave behind what has worked before but this evolution has been coming for some time and is just as authentic as before. I started making oak gall ink in 2011 when I lived off-grid in my Nomadic Studio in an oak woodland in West Wales. In 2020, during the first pandemic lockdown, I started to broaden my palette, creating colour from plants grown and foraged around our land.

I’m excited about making this work. My next large solo exhibition at Elysium gallery in Swansea in 2023, supported by an Arts Council Wales Create grant will be all about this work.

Below are the two paintings which will be shown at the RWA in Bristol, UK.