Stained with Light

Overview

In this exhibition, Sarah Murray brings together earlier work exploring an embodied experience of landscape and current work exploring the sublime, spirituality and sin, all with their characteristic style of gestural abstracted work. Murray has created a series of paintings in acrylic and oils that explore the painterly dynamics of figuration vs representation, layering, shifting grounds, gestural mark-making and vibrant use of colour.

Murray creates vibrant, visceral compositions, using references to religious art-historical paintings as a grounding for their explorations. Using traditional and non-traditional supports of sewn quilt-like canvases, Murray elevates the work as image and object and has a great interest of the act of making and process informing their work. Their earlier work has explored creating an embodied experience of landscape, with working en-plein air and using the space, place and time of the landscape to inform the work.

They are currently using similar visual language to explore themes of sublime vs grotesque and depictions of sin and spirituality in art-historical works, translating these to their own experience. Creating works that move and transform from form to mark, creating hidden layers of images and meaning in the works.