Ghosts in the Water
By Sara Edwards
Introducing Sara Edwards’, emerging artist’s, first solo show “Ghosts in the Water”. The title refers to the two years Ms. Edwards spent in the South Pacific working as an anthropologist. Evoking the indigenous belief that the water is populated with ghosts, Ms. Edwards broadens the concept to refer to our traumas and dreams deeply buried in places and spaces in the universal human subconscious. She draws on mythology to paint dreamlike landscapes of color populated with flattened shapes – symbols of love, grief, innocence, lust and magic. Rich color and black and white works access human emotion that surpasses language.
About the Artist:
Ms. Edwards is a visual artist engaging scale and color in abstract and figurative painting.
Sara’s current works materialize through oil, graphite, acrylic and oil pastels. Highly textured marks powerfully engage scale, panels of rich sensual color, and rhythmic, repeating forms.
Ms. Edwards’ work is concerned with memory, trauma, and the aftermath of human large scale and intimate conflict.
Drawing on the history of symbolist and color field painters, as well as street artists, Sara paints abstracted shapes and figures in landscapes of pure color. Her artistic arc coheres: the rigorous formalism of the fine arts; the freedom and revolution of global graffiti practices; and the poetic imaginaries of mythology, dreams and the unconscious.
With this, Ms. Edwards invites her viewer to visually perceive with their felt senses, and emotionally see beyond the painting surface into realities of things as they really are — beauty and devastation, awe, powerful mark making, emotion, light, color —
— and, magic.
Ms. Edwards studied with the late Graham Nickson; and also, at the Art Students League under Peter Bonner, Pat Lipsky and Michael Bourbon in New York City.
Sara lives and paints in New York City.
