Friday Focus: Sarah Dwyer
Sarah Dwyer (b. 1974, Ireland) is an artist who lives and works in London. Drawing is at the heart of her process, often combined with painting, printmaking, and sculpture, resulting in re-imaginings of the familiar through exuberant colour palettes and lively approaches to mark-making. Incorporating both figurative and abstract imagery, her dynamic compositions are the result of processing her own surroundings and the human day-to-day experience, in addition to an indulgence in our desire for play. Surfaces, in turn, retain traces of process and development within their own archive and present the viewer with a navigable visual history.
In her most recent work, life drawing anchors Dwyer’s practice. The conversation between the figure and the artist’s hand evolves through the seams, creases, and cracks of flesh, and the weight, line, and form of the corresponding marks. Exploratory and dynamic, Dwyer wields drawing as a method of processing her own relationship with the body and confronting the experiences of which the body keeps score. In performing the body’s expansion and contraction, growth, loss, and change, life drawing becomes a tripartite act of survival, celebration, and achievement.
Dwyer earned a Master’s in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2004 after an MFA from Staffordshire University in 2001. Her work has is currently in a solo show 'Clatter.....THUD' at Jane Lombard NY also showing recently at Fabian Lang Gallery, Zurich; PiArtworks, London; Pigeon Park, Manor Place, London; in three solo shows at Josh Lilley Gallery, London; Hastings Contemporary, Hastings, UK; Hair & Nails Gallery, MN; Rochester Art Center, MN; Bloomberg Space, London, UK; Kyubidou Gallery, Tokyo, JP; Jane Lombard Gallery NY, NY; Fe McWilliam Gallery, NIR; Royal College of Art, London, UK; Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK; Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, IE. Dwyer is represented by Pi Artworks, London.
Can you tell me about your practice? How do you get started on a piece of work?
Life drawing and sketchbooks are an integral part of my painting process. Being able to refer to lots of compositional studies and to combine them into something new on the surface of the canvas is exciting for me. I use pastel, fast drawing onto a canvas. I start with an initial sketch in response to life drawings, often using a strong pink or orange ground on the canvas. The first and last steps to a painting are always the most challenging.
Who or what are your biggest influences?
Poetry
Philip Guston
Eva Hesse
Outsider Art
Louise Bourgeois
Asger Jorn from the Cobra Movement
Storytelling plays a central role in your practice regardless of what medium you adopt, be it painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing. Can you talk further about this and whether it forms what medium you use to create work?
Storytelling has become more important of late confronting my own experiences and others life stories, facing the vulnerability of the body and the fragility of life. LUMPS AND BUMPS are ever changing, our bodies surprise us. Mapping our own lives and stories interest me, paintings are like skin, they retain a history on the surface like a palimpsest that slowly reveals itself to you. This notion has always held significance for me.
Oil Bars and Lucy my dog who is my studio companion....she saved me when I was at my lowest ebb a few years ago.
Philip Guston Works on paper, Hantje Cantz, 2007 I saw this show in the Louisiana Museum in 2007 and The Morgan Library & Museum, New York in 2008, I often reflect on his paintings & drawings, I just pick it up in the studio to flick through the drawings which can be quite meditative.
Finally, is there anything new coming up that you would like to tell us about?