Bio: Sarah Macdonald is an artist based in South East London. Sarah studied at BA in Fine Art (Textiles) at Goldsmiths College and an MFA in Painting at The Slade School of Fine Art, graduating in 2009, when she was awarded the Claire Winston Memorial Award. Her work has been shown in exhibitions at various institutions including The Drawing Room, APT, and Turps Banana. In 2015 she was an Honorary Research Associate in Post-Graduate painting at the Slade School of Fine Art. Sarah is a board member of Tannery Arts in London. She is a lecturer at Greenwich University and a tutor on the Goldsmiths Fine Art Summer School, where drawing and context form a key part of her teaching.
Statement: Through my paintings and drawings, I layer patterns and images to build compositions. I am interested in the moment that a familiar everyday object slips into abstract form. I want to invite the viewer to consider the status of form and space through my work. I utilise templates, drop shadows, scale, and gestural mark-making to challenge the presentation of space within the painting.
The re-drawing and re-painting of shapes from observation and memory allow me to rediscover spaces and form within pictorial space. References accumulate; ranging from 1940’s handwriting patterns, Scandinavian interior design, to motifs in cinematography and literature; specifically contemporary feminist theory and Autofiction. These references enable me to reconsider vital canonical painting discourse. Painterly gesture and the relationship between drawing and painting and observation are central to this. Thus, my work responds to the work of artists Charline Von Heyl, Betty Woodman, Raoul de Keyser and Philip Guston.
I want to sustain an ambiguity of interpretation, where shapes can slip in and out of describing identifiable forms, in a similar way to the way that memory operates and plays with the act of recognition. For me, painting can both represent and question verisimilitude, it is the ultimate virtual plane. I want my painting to speak of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the monument and the everyday object.
