Sarah Needham

Test Residency 3

We are delighted that Sarah Needham is going to be here from 20th February as our next artist in residence. Sarah, a painter from London, is concerned with human inter-connectedness, and the interplay between the personal and the universal as expressed though the material  of pigment. She makes her own pigments and has an interest in the way in which pigments leave material colour across human history and geography and traces of people's interactions. There is a sense in which these colours hold more than the formal record, they hold nuance and space for connection, for potential and extant symbolism and for the stories never told.

Sarah will be visiting the villages that women accused of witchcraft came from, collecting a sense of place as it is, looking for elements from their history and for an elemental link. She would particularly like to connect and converse with people who have knowledge in the history of witchcraft in the Essex/Suffolk border areas so please get in touch if you would like to help her with her research.

The paintings that Sarah makes are abstract spaces, spaces to fall into to get lost and to remember. She acknowledges artists including Rothko, Frankenthaler, Kandinsky and Sonia Delaunay for the freedom to play in these colour fields and breakthroughs with colour as substance as well as the unnamed Church painters of the Middle ages for whom pigments had their own symbolism.  Technically the medieval dislike of palette mixing, which was a question of material interference, echoes in Sarah's work where she likes to retain the integrity of a pigment for the story which it holds. She is also indebted to the developments of oil painting introduced by the Northern Renaissance artists and the technical traditions of glazing which allow her to layer pigments, and mix through translucency.