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.  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.

Her 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.  The work then progresses toward abstraction incorporating talismanic objects, symbols from nature, magical thinking and rituals.  From this a semi abstract series of artworks emerge which speak of a sense of place and our human relationship to it.

“The recent prints are part of a new body of work which is just emerging.   I am working under the broad title  “fragmentary landscape dreaming” exploring the memories of landscape, snapshots in my mind of places and scenes.  I am trying to work with memory and impression rather than realistic reproduction.

I wanted to work using transparent colours, allowing the white of the paper to shine through the print, much in the same way as watercolours do. These generate interference colours where the colour layers overlap.  Printing is done freely using torn paper to mask some areas while allowing other parts of the screen to remain open and print. It is very much an iterative and painterly process, laying down some colour then picking the next colour and adding it.  As a result each print is unique and there are no editions or duplicates.  In making these fragment prints I worked without a set plan, building up the colours and marks.   I knew I wanted to use the trees.  These trees are specific trees which I visit regularly in life and in my art work and I think of them as “ friends”.

After I completed the prints I suddenly realised they bore a strong relationship to the images of the Aurora which were so strong over Dumfries and Galloway on the 9th May 2024.  So I realised that the evening spent watching the aurora had lodged itself in my subconscious and the pictures came from this experience. Fragments of memories.  The silver leaf incorporated into one print is about the early morning light on rivers.  Often as I cross the hill from Glencairn heading toward Dumfries there is a blast of shining light hitting off the Solway and the Nith near Glencaple”

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