SHIFT (Somerset’s Brilliant Coast)

This project was led in partnership by Somerset Wildlife Trust, Contains Art, Hinkley Point CIM Fund and East Quay, Somerset. 

Occurring within the COVID-19 pandemic, it created an inextricable frame within which Sara could re-establish her relationship with her local coast.

She created paints from mud-stones and rocks collected along the Somerset Coast. Making videos of rocks, studying geological slides, drawing with seagull feathers, sieving, pouring and draining mud; all jostled together in the process of creating these unpredictable and fluid paintings.

Sara embarked upon a ‘sporadic, nomadic residency’ along the Somerset coast, to test the efficacy of her work. Covid-19 lockdowns cut-short her plan to work her way along the coast, inviting questions, playful encounters and practical daubings with mud paints with willing beach visitors. The conversations, surprises and social interactions stimulated by the paintings and their process have synthesised with her own studio-based experiments to help shape the works. 

These paintings, using the most ancient of painterly processes, investigate ideas of coast, tidal shifts, the dynamic equilibrium of marine and shore ecology, the deep time compressed within the layers of rock, the continual process of change and erosion which defines the ecotone of this fragile coast. She has been testing the function of painting to engender a deepened connection with the coast. 

These works were originally exhibited at East Quay, Watchet, Somerset in 2021 in ‘SHIFT | 9 artists respond to Somerset’s Brilliant Coast’

Works from this project have been exhibited at:

The Burton Open, Bideford, Devon, 2021

The Royal West of England Academy of Art, 2022

‘Memory Into Landscape’, Elysium Gallery, Swansea, 2022

Bath Society IOpen Exhibition, Victoria Gallery, Bath, 2022

‘Landscape (Re)View’ @ The Wall, Musgrove Park Hospital, Somerset 2023

‘FLOW’, Somerset Rural Life Museum 2023