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SARAH SUMMERS
BLUE, FALLING AND RISING

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As I write this, the sky is falling on my garden.  A slim point in time when the sun sets and all turns blue.  Watching night’s steady approach from a window, blue falls with a thick density, a heaviness, then disappears.  Hours after, a new blue rises in the sky, dark and deep.  In between are its neighbours: green and purple.


‘Blue, falling and rising’ is a meditation on this moment, interwoven with two books I was reading at the time, Bluets by Maggie Nelson and A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit.  Solnit writes, ‘The world is blue at its edges and in its depths.  This blue is the light that gets lost.’  As a colour it ‘draws us after it’ (Goethe), and so creates a space between, a space of distance, desire, and longing.  My longing for this brief blue increases as it fades.


These paintings follow blue around my garden, and become containers for feelings that are awakened.  I express a sense of density by pushing colours up against each other, wanting their edges to press, thinking of shapes in stained glass.  The paint takes on a velvet texture, thick yet silky.  The final works are informed by multiple studies, in pencil, gouache, and watercolour, a repetitive drawing practice that opens new mysteries and ways of seeing.

Sarah Summers is a visual artist living and working in Melbourne, Victoria.

Her studio practice is centred around painting and drawing, where she explores darkness as a space of strangeness, imagination, and growth. Informed by poetry, literature, and hours of quiet looking, Sarah paints and draws her house, garden, and local suburb – the familiar transformed by night. Her process allows for an openness of subject, so that the material can speak, and surprises can emerge.

Since graduating from Curtin University with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 2016, Sarah has shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions around Australia, and she was a finalist in the Len Fox Painting Award in 2019.

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SARAH SUMMERS

B. 1990
Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia

 

EDUCATION


2016    Bachelor of Fine Art, Curtin University, WA
 

SOLO EXHIBITIONS


2021    Blue, falling and rising, A.K Bellinger Gallery, Inverell, NSW
2021    Fear not the harsh winter, Rubicon ARI, North Melbourne, VIC
2019    Evening spread against my eyes, Yarra Sculpture Gallery, Abbotsford, VIC

 

GROUP EXHIBITIONS


2020    Unleashed, Pea Green Boat, Brunswick, VIC
            Night Shadows, A.K Bellinger Gallery, Inverell, NSW
2019    Friends and Family, Daine Singer, Fitzroy, VIC
            Glow, Neon Parlour, Thornbury, VIC
            Len Fox Painting Award, Castlemaine Art Museum, Castlemaine, VIC
            The Rubicon Experiment, Rubicon ARI, Melbourne, VIC
            Outside In, Art, Not Apart, New Acton, ACT (Curated by Chloe Mandryk)
            50 Squared Art Prize, Brunswick Street Gallery, Fitzroy, VIC
2018    Behind the Curtain, Yarra Sculpture Gallery, Abbotsford, VIC (curated by Julian Cobb)
            Aberration, The Burrow, Fitzroy, VIC
            Out of Place, Aeso Studios, Fitzroy, VIC
2017    Between Black and White, Canberra ArtWorks, ACT
2015    MERGE, Belconnen Arts Centre, Belconnen, ACT


AWARDS AND RESIDENCIES


2019    Finalist, Len Fox Painting Award, Castlemaine, VIC
            The Pickers Hut Artist Residency, Glaziers Bay, TAS


GRANTS


2019     Small Projects Grant 2018-2019, Yarra City Arts, Yarra City Council


PUBLICATIONS


2019     Rebecca Blake, Outside In, Exhibition Essay, ANCA Art Bus, Art, Not Apart

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