about.
Sarah's work explains the female experience and response to the injustice presented by existing within a patriarchy. She creates portraits of women that explain emotions or events that for one reason or another have been veiled or silenced. Her body of work is split into two collections, the first is the female struggle with adult ADHD and other mental health issues. The second is the truths of female musicians and their response to and oppressive and toxic culture. The two collections are connected by the artists research into feminist and gender theory, feminist psychoanalysis as well as exploring art made by feminist artists in response to patriarchal stereotypes. The work is exposing female behaviour in response to the environment.
The work is about more than raising awareness, it is about unveiling and awakening one story at a time.
The artist uses facial expression and body language that is uncommon in the representation of the female form in traditional art. We can see in the ADHD collection, her forms are unsettling and awkward, and in her musician collection we can see they are powerful or established. The forms are taken from a selection of her own posed photographs and reinvented and edited images found through research. Each painting is titled or captioned with insight into the narrative in a bid to spread the truth of each of the experiences depicted. The viewer needs to question – why are they so shocked to see women presented this way, do they find them ugly, uncanny or even intimidating?
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Taking figurative forms and abstracting them, Sarah uses disrupted realism as a metaphor for the contradictions of society and the chaos in expectation verses reality. She uses painterly techniques such as layers and washes to build layers and depth to emphasise the idea of a veil or a filtered reality. There is an obvious separation in the collections through their colour pallet, whereby the mental health paintings take on a darker and cloudier palette and the musicians are colourful are vibrant. The overall paintings are smooth and fairly soft focus, with thin glazes which shows a carefully considered, slightly ethereal intention.
contact.
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Artwork, prints and commissions are available to purchase,
please contact the artist.
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Instagram: @sarah_holland_art