Sarah Keast

Sarah Keast is a visual artist based in Moniaive, Dumfries and Galloway.  She works in mixed media combining printmaking, painting, drawing sculpture and collage.  She works from a home studio using a screenprinting bench press and etching press.  Work ranges from small collograph images to largescale mixed media works and direct installation on walls.  The images produced are often semi abstract, recognisably derived from a place or landscape but altered in the creative process to include something from the inner psyche of the artist.

From a childhood spent in the Scottish countryside Sarah’s work is informed by her life-long interest in geology, landscape and nature.  The natural world is her sacred space where she finds solace and spirituality.    Her early career was in geology then conservation and environmental management. This scientific background informs her creative process and has led to an awareness of the fragility of human survival in the face of the power of nature, something which is becoming more apparent as human induced climate change begins to take hold.    Her art is concerned with the relationship between humans and the natural world both in the contemporary world and throughout archaeological time.   She has spent many years studying pre-historic archaeological sites, living for a while in the Orkney Islands and visiting similar sites across the UK.  The monuments are often on a landscape scale, like a prehistoric form of environmental art.  Henge monuments, stone circles, processional pathways rock art and burial spaces are set in “ceremonial landscapes” covering miles of open countryside.  This connection to sacred spaces in nature is pivotal in Sarah’s current creative process and is a mirror for her own nature based spirituality. She has undertaken some training in Art Psychotherapy and she is interested in art as a means of non-verbal communication.  This has led her to her current semi abstract/ semi realist creative process.

Her creative process begins with site specific recording though drawings photographs and research. The ideas for final images emerge from this process and are often sketched or painted first to capture the feel and colours.   Once printing the creative process becomes an iterative one: each mark is made as an experiment and then followed by another and another.  Her intention is to use colour and form in nature to capture something of the sense of place so that, to the viewer, there is some anchor of familiarity with the known landscape.  The work then progresses toward abstraction incorporating talismanic objects, symbols from nature, magical thinking and rituals which drifted alongside the experiences of the sense of place, present day land use, and wildlife.  From this a semi abstract series of artworks emerge which speak of a place and our human relationship to it.

She has recently embarked on a new body of work which is developing under the heading “FRAGMENTORY  LANDSCAPE  DREAMING”.  This draws on memory of place: momentary glimpses of the landscape lit by a winter shaft of sunlight against a darkening sky; the memories stirred by returning to a once familiar place after a long absence or that sense of the passage of time gleaned from ruined and decaying human relics in the landscape.   Sarah is exploring liminal places: places of transition or change; ideas of uncertainty, the unknown and the half remembered.  This resonates with the many contemporary transitions going on in the world order and climate change and on changes in her own life.  She tries to evoke connection to place in her images.  Her art aims to engender a spiritual and emotional relationship to land and nature.