Sara Willett
Degree: Fine Art
University: Camberwell College of Art
Graduation Year: 2002
New Blood Art Commentary
Sara Willett’s paintings emerge from what feels like an endearing and hopeful obsessive compulsion – one that charts repetition not as pathology, but as a form of devotion. The process is slow, layered, and meticulous, and the result is a kind of visual ambiguity that holds you in place: a surface that pulses, tilts, breathes.
Her paintings often operate like dreams – fragmentary yet precise, abstract yet tethered to the body. They evoke systems we half-recognise: nets, maps, cells, currents. Beneath the delicate geometries is something less graspable – a tension between control and release, structure and softness.
Willett’s work draws on a wide range of influences, from Chinese landscape painting and Flemish miniatures to textiles, science fiction, and domestic craft. She also works across installation and photography, with each medium feeding the other in a quiet feedback loop. What remains constant is the labour: the marks, the movement, the sense of time made visible.
Her work is held in collections in the UK and internationally, and has been featured in A-N Magazine.
Artist Statement
My recent paintings follow an evolving methodology. I create detailed, multi-layered, fragmented surfaces through which I aim to investigate perception and illusion. The triangular or circular forms that swarm across the surface evolve gradually over time. The process consists of both systematic repetition and reflective experience and the results are never entirely predictable or envisaged. The nets or webs also act as a form of diagram to the paintings, their flow often working in opposition to the rhythms of the underlying layers to create visual tensions and dynamic movement. The results play with the stability of the viewing experience, sometimes reversing the negative spaces and disrupting the saturated colour field, confusing the eye and tricking the brain.
There is a desire through the labour intensity of the work for the monumental and prosaic to co-exist and for the results to act as a record of the temporal activity, tracing its rhythms and movements. The work also explores the pictorial surface and space as a platform for metamorphosis, transformation and evolution. The paintings often have a playful element, hovering between abstract and representational, elevating the mundane to an absurdly heightened status. The imagery is sourced from a diverse variety of influences including fabrics, mosaics, Chinese landscape painting, Flemish primitive painting, micro/macro biological, sci-fi and pseudo science, as well as referencing traditional domestic and quotidian crafts. I am also interested in the potential of the decorative itself to act as a disruptive or unsettling force. Although painting is the locus of my practice, I also work in a variety of mediums, including photography, printmaking and large scale installations, which immerse the viewer in sensory environments. An interactive dialogue between the installations and paintings often develop, with one informing and advancing the other.
