Sarah Medway is an established artist who has taken part in over 150 Group Exhibitions and 25 Solo Shows both in the UK and abroad.
Artist’s statement
I was born by the sea in a place with the sea in its name, Seaton Carew, in the north east of England. I spent my formative years on the north Norfolk coast, where my perception was flooded daily by the mysteries and magic of water, wide skies and the perpetually changing symphonies of light, sounds and movement. Coming out of the English Northern Romantic tradition, my early paintings were concerned with tall and deep spaces, landscapes, particularly trees and water. In this subject several aspirations and necessities converged: to find a visual equivalent, out in the world, for an inner emotive reality predominated. The paintings explored an early longing, for what I could call ‘My Place’, without ever having been there or indeed even knowing it. It was the liberating certainty of paint on canvas that assisted me to articulate, visually, that otherwise elusive place, and know it for the first time, time and time again.
‘Looking at an exhibition of Sarah Medway’s work, the viewer is struck by the distinctness and range of her language: one authentic voice sings from all her canvases. And yet consider the emotional range of her works. Medway’s fresh, contemporary, invigorating, sensual, and – historically, critically and psychologically – astute art gives us grounds to hope that a much-needed moment in the annals of abstract art is on its way: a new beginning’.
David Cohen
‘As Heraclitus observed, ‘nature loves to hide’, and it is with this idea in mind that we should approach the abstracted landscapes (or dreamscapes) of Sarah Medway. As her work has moved ever further from the faithful and naturalistic recording of the real world, so has her philosophical grasp of the issues at stake deepened. As long ago as 1995 I first used Anthony Burgess’ evocative definition of art as a ‘static shimmer’, in relation to Medway’s paintings. As her work has increased in ambition and authority, it may be said that not only a static shimmer, but an ecstatic shimmer animates it’.
Andrew Lambirth
