From the studio No.32 →

I’ve got some exciting news about a new project that I’ve been focused on developing over the last 4 months. If you saw my solo exhibition in 2023 (either in the real or on my video tour), you will have spotted an area showing a few pieces from a mini clothing collection, natural dyed with botanical colour, with prints inspired by the art work. I am creating sustainable, ethical, designed, sourced and manufactured in the UK, clothing brand, SONNET by Sarah Poland.

If you'd like to follow my journey to create SONNET by Sarah Poland, receive product launch and pop-up invitations plus find out why the logo is like it is, you can sign-up on the website. www.sonnetbysarahpoland.com

You can also follow me on social media: Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook, Youtube, all sonnetbysarahpoland

Sunrise at the Do Lectures 2022.

I visited National Weaving recently, a label weaving factory which happens to be close to me here in West Wales. It was amazing and Very Noisy. They have many machines which weave names tapes, luggage straps, brand labels and badges and printed labels, each operated by a person (wearing ear defenders), they even have a vintage machine graveyard for spare parts and relics to one day restore.

I took a few videos of the looms which I’ll post next time, I’m currently on a weekend away at the Secret Dyery in Oxfordshire, learning about botanical ink screen printing with the wonderful Kate Turnbull - more on that next time too! I also visited a manufacturer in London last week to meet and talk over making a sample with them before production. It's pretty exciting And nerve-wracking!

Please help spread the news and if you know someone who might be interested, let them know.

My best,

Sarah

FROM THE STUDIO NO.18 (24th Jul 2022)

From 24th July 2022 newsletter.

I seem to have skipped a month…or two…hmmm so what’s been happening?

Well, I’ve been to the Do Lectures and have taken a while to land. If you don’t know about it check out their website, it’s a festival of ideas to put it lightly. All of the talks are online.

It’s also been fantastic weather here, it’s the school holidays, so beach camps and lighting the dye-bath fire. I’ve had a little help from some cinnabar moths to harvest dye plants and hang up the dyed fabric.

I realised today that I have a few exhibition openings to tell you about, it’s a weekend of events actually. You are most welcome to attend any of the events and please do come and say hi if you do.

I entered the Beep Painting Prize, an open submission juried exhibition. Launched in 2012, BEEP (biennial exhibition of painting) is a contemporary international painting prize based in Swansea, Wales. So, nice and local. I’m really excited to get into this.

Mysteries Unfold Outside Of Time was selected for the exhibition, which opens on Friday 29th July at 7pm. The Elysium Gallery bar will merge into the after party as usual.

Mysteries Unfold Outside Of Time 2022

Botanical colour on gesso on birch ply panel, 122x122cm

The Beep Painting Prize is the first exhibition opening of the Beep Painting Biennial where there will be many exhibitions Swansea wide. Saturday 30th July 7pm opens the touring exhibition Walking In Two Worlds, in which I have several pieces. This exhibition takes place at the large Volcano Theatre Gallery. (This posters date starts in June, I can only assume that it was delayed for some reason).

The third exhibition opening this weekend is the Salon De Refuse at Aberystwyth Arts Centre. It coincides with the National Eisteddfod which is a celebration of the culture and language in Wales and alternates between North and South Wales every year. I entered a large painting and photograph diptych into the National Eisteddfod and was ‘refused’ and have been accepted into the Salon De Refuses.

In case you don’t know, the Salon De Refuses is generally known as an exhibition of works rejected by the jury of the official Paris Salon. Famously Manet, Pissaro, Courbet, Whistler and many impressionists were rejected in the Salon of 1863, but the critical attention ultimately legitimized the emerging avant-garde in painting.

This opens at Aberystwyth Arts Centre on Sunday evening, July 31st at 5pm in Oriel 2.

I’ll be at Beep and Walking In Two Worlds. Hope to see you there!

STUDIO JOURNAL 8

From 3rd April 2022 newsletter - Drawn to nature

Here on Friday morning in South-West Wales, we woke up with melted, hardened, snowy hail. Crunchy under foot, the school run brought back memories of Scottish winters driving through creaky snow laden roads.

I grew up in the Scottish Highlands, in an area of rich soils and deciduous forests, between the foothills of the Cairngorm mountains and the sea. For some years I spent every weekend during winter with the Cairngorm ski club; season pass strapped to my arm, balaklava and hat pulled high to protect my face from the often fierce and bitter weather. In fact, lunchtimes were regularly spent thawing out our gloves and balaclavas under hand driers whilst eating squished semi-frozen egg sandwiches.

However, when the weather was clear and dry, it felt like the most beautiful place in the world. More corries than peaks, deep and snow covered, it was a place where you looked down rather than across or up.

Infact, the Scots don’t call their hills mountains, they’re hills. I think there’s a modesty to it, they aren’t towering and grand like the Alps. Yet within this modesty belies an awe. They are awesome in the true sense of the word and having spent some time away now from both Cairngorm and Nevis Range, on occasion to return I have been humbly brought to a standstill.

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In 2007, whilst travelling from West Cornwall to an artist residency in the Northern Isles (Shetland), I stopped near Inverness with some great friends. One of them, Mandy, lent me her book Findings by Kathleen Jamie. Handing it to me she told me I should read it. It took me half of the book before it fully got into me. And it got me.

While I was doing my fine art Masters I was looking for books to see how writers tackled the subject of nature and landscape. I read Thoreau, Emerson plus other great writings but they were not what I was looking for. I wanted something to really resonate with my approach. Kathleen Jamie’s Findings led me on to discover The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd. The difference in these writers to the previous readings was what I was looking for. Less conquestorial, more about place and the poetics of it.

Cairngorm from the A9

The Living Mountain is a personal account of being in and knowing the Cairngorms. In the studio this week, listening to it this time around, it is sympathetically read with a voice which lulls one into the miracle and beauty of nature.

I quote The Living Mountain, Chapter 11 : The Senses

‘For the ear the most vital thing that can be listened to here is silence. To bend the ear to silence is to discover how seldom it is there. Always something moves. When the air is quite still, there is always running water, and up here that is a sound that one can hardly lose, though on many stony parts of the plateau one is above the water courses. But now and then comes an hour when the silence is all but absolute and listening to it one slips out of time.

Such a silence is not a mere negation of sound. It is like a new element and if water is still sounding with a low far off murmur, it is no more than last edge of an element we are leaving, as the last edge of land hangs on the mariners horizon. Such moments come in mist, or snow, or a summer night when it is too cool for the clouds of insects to be abroad, or a September dawn. In September dawns I hardly breathe. I am an image in a ball of glass. The world is suspended there and I in it. ‘

Passing the Eastern edge of the Cairngorms on the A9.

I have another friend, who now lives at the foot of Ben Nevis. She is a geologist and mountain guide to put it lightly. Her current job involves a walking commute to a very specific area of Nevis Range to monitor moss and grass. Her walk to work is 6 hours one way. She used to live in the Cairngorms and told me once that she doesn't get lost there, doesn't actually need a map and compass (although she’s got a heid enough to take one). She said, even in fog she knows every rock and can find her way.

Now this, is knowing a place.

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It is difficult to better the mountain and sea air and they are places that I have always been drawn towards.

All of these photos have been included because I have always really appreciated how both fog and snow rub out features (and sounds) in the landscape, altering distance and scale. Everything becoming visually simplified.

One of my favourite south-west Wales beaches local to us.

And yes, it is a secret!

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