Lyndsey Ingram has announced the reopening of her London gallery with a show of new work by the British artist Sarah Graham. Known for her expressive, large-scale drawings of the natural world, the artist is presenting a new subject matter focused on the surreal juxtaposition of flowers and insects. She has drawn the flowers from life as much as possible and the insects from the National History Museum’s collection. All 17 works are ink on paper. At a time when the world has been in lockdown for months, observing spring at close quarters, Graham’s vision of the beauty and strangeness of nature may be particularly relevant to modern sensibilities. The show coincides with the publication of the first monograph on her work, written by Ruth Guilding, with photography by Miguel Flores-Vianna (Ridinghouse Publishers). Sarah GrahamLyndsey Ingram In Graham’s recent body of work, hellebores and peonies intertwine in an intimate dance with bees and butterflies, all painted in Graham’s characteristic large scale. Their magnification, combined with exquisite detail, transforms these drawings of flora and fauna into evocative images of a world often overlooked. Viewers are enveloped as they stand dwarfed by the beetles and blossoms so often trodden underfoot. Despite her horticultural subjects, Graham insists she is not a botanical artist. For her, absolute accuracy holds little appeal: ‘Too much dedication to the original source deadens it for me,’ she says. Graham is not documenting nature but instead translating it into an expressive artistic language punctuated by calligraphic brush strokes of plant-based pigments. ‘I just want to draw and look; I‘m looking for an expression. I see a curve or a twist or a pronunciation of some form that I’ve somehow got to get into the studio and magnify.’ Sarah GrahamLyndsey Ingram Everything about Graham’s work is based in nature, from the subject to the inks themselves: compounds of plant-based dyes and iron-based mineral pigments sourced from a family of artisan colour alchemists in Basel, Switzerland. She uses these because they produce livelier and more subtle tones than chemically derived colours. ‘I can’t paint in oils. My way of working is much…
Artists
