60 x 60 cm | 23 x 23 in
Subject: Abstract
Tags:
Flower,
Pink
Original painting in acrylic and spray paint on wood.
Willett’s paintings are visually mesmerizing, tonal paintings that emerge from what seems like an endearing and hopeful obsessive compulsion – a visual ambiguity is manifest. The finished effect is like watching continually moving shoals of fish or swarming insects.
"The image is suggestive of natural forms, of seed pods ready to burst or cellular structures jostling for position."
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.