Sara Dudman - Somerset Art Works

The natural environment and its myriad of inhabitants with their interwoven relationships has been a constant fascination and the enduring locus of my artistic practice.

As an artist already deeply immersed in nature, living in the Blackdown Hills AONB, I’d considered myself to already know my own locality. Adjusting to isolation has been a process of realignment with the world. I found myself walking and re-walking familiar routes during this period, triggering nuanced natural encounters with my own locality and providing space for slowing down and finding stillness. Confined to a restricted geographic area, my curiosity invited me into a deeper engagement with my own habitat, as if becoming reacquainted with an old friend. Foraging for wild garlic and other woodland or hedgerow treasures easily developed from cooking into paint-making. My locality has become not only the subject of my paintings but the source of my materials too. I am making my own wild paints, extracting pigments from wild flowers such as bluebells, buttercups and dandelions.

I am unlearning how to paint.

Using unpredictable media, whose characteristics are volatile and uncertain, will fade, change and shift, echo the days of uncertainty we are living through. My experiments have begun to branch out into creating paints from mud-stones collected on Berrow beach. Working with mud paints is an extraordinary experience. They do not behave in the same way as any other paints I have ever used. It is as though I am having a conversation with the earth, the world, my ancestors, every human who has lived on this planet, whilst I make each mark.

Lockdown has been very grounding for me: physically, metaphorically and emotionally.

Website: http://saradudman.com/

Instagram: @saradudman1
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