artist |educator

Shifting relationships with the environment are at the heart of my work and development.

My practice explores emotional and analytical responses to environment, increasingly informed by research, particularly:

  1. Coastal erosion
  2. Analogous relationships of wild flocks and swarms with their environment
  3. Migratory seabirds as indicators of climate change.

I frequently use low-tech video and photography as sources for reprocessing experiences through drawing and painting and increasingly I use lens-based media as artistic output per se. Immersion in rural and remote places is essential to my work.
The drive of my practice centres on an urgent need to review our collective relationship with the world we inhabit.
I exhibit extensively, fundraise and lead projects, curate exhibitions, create work alone and in collaboration & lead community participation and education activity.
I was elected an academician at the Royal West of England Academy of Art in 2016.
Exploring the physical world is central to my practice, examining notions of ‘permanence and impermanence’ and ‘substance and essence’, including human and animal relationships with ecology and geology. Individual elements are often isolated or juxtaposed (e.g. rocks, swarms, cairns), expressing literal and metaphorical interpretations of places simultaneously.
My work is process-led; the interplay between the craft of creating artworks with the conceptual intent is crucial in developing my works beyond either purely aesthetic or wholly conceptual artefacts. The methods and materials used in making each work direct the outcomes in equal measure to the initial concept. 
My works speak of ‘matter’ whether in subject, materials or questioning the flatness and reduction of photography.
In contrast to the over-saturated, heightened, screen-based reality through which we increasingly experience the earth, my work reclaims the world as a personal encounter of depth and complexity. Painting for me is a necessarily ponderous activity. Gestures and marks speak of authorship and authenticity. Digital video and photographic elements of my practice are reconciled with hand-crafted drawings and paintings through a consistent urge to examine and reinterpret inevitably changing relationships with environment.
My works present a re-enchantment with the world.

Sara Dudman