200 x 150 cm | 78 x 59 in
Original painting in oil on board.
"I started this piece during my residency this summer in the Da Wang arts centre in South China. It was influenced by the extraordinary landscape of the surrounding Wu Tong mountain range. I also reference the 'blue and green' landscape painting of the Song dynasty particularly Wang Ximeng's masterpiece 'A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains'. This piece has been selected by Richard Deacon for inclusion in the prestigious, Creekside Open, at APT Gallery in London 2015."
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.