150 x 100 cm | 59 x 39 in
Subject: Abstract
Tags:
Pale,
Gentle,
Curve,
Neutral Palette,
Limited_Palette
Original painting in oil on wood panel.
"'Shadow Play' is the latest piece to develop the ideas in the series I call 'Everyday Sublime'. I have been thinking about the transformative possibilities of painting and its ability to elevate even the humblest of everyday objects. In the 'Everyday Sublime' series of paintings I have taken lowly disposable kitchen cloths - material that I use every day in my studio - and have tried to pay them the same attention as the flemish primitive masters might have given to the sumptuous fabrics they painted. The results hover between abstraction and representation and have the 'aura' of something precious, something rarified."
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.