Sarah Nicholson is a practising Fine Artist based in Northwest England. She graduated from the University of Central Lancashire in 1997 and added MA from the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design in 2004.

For ten years Sarah has created drawings of the industrial landscape, using snatched glimpses from trains or cars to make thumbnail sketches, which are then worked up into large scale pastel drawings. The work is bold and bright – celebrating this country’s’ industrial heritage and the many people who work in it. She has exhibited and sold her pastel works widely in this country and her work is represented in private, corporate and university collections. She hopes to move her work on into Europe and the USA in the near future.

Having spent three years making large installations for her BA (Hons) in Fine Art, Sarah found herself without the luxury of a studio or even a domestic space large enough to work. She therefore returned to paper to create a range of works inspired by her travels around the country, under the title “Visionary Industry”, indulging herself in the aesthetic qualities of the industrial landscape without the constraints of academic theory to justify her pleasure.

However, inevitably, the more you do something the more you think about it, and Nicholson found herself gradually discovering the theoretical ground behind the images, uncovering relations to the tradition of the Visionary Landscape as propounded by Samuel Palmer in the 1800’s and more recently by artists such as Prunella Clough and David Blackburn.

“My interest in the industrial landscape started in 1994 when I was inspired to visit and record Parkside Colliery in the final days before its demolition. The energy of the people I met there seemed to also reside in the buildings and I have found myself recognizing this energy in other industrial sites.

The vivid pigment of the pastels, applied in raw line or mixed in layers on the paper present the industrial landscape as both bold and fragile, reminding us of how brief but impacting their history is in relation to the environment and to our modern lives. These ubiquitous buildings are often almost invisible to us, or viewed as an eyesore, yet their impression on our lives is everywhere.”

It was with great pleasure that Sarah was able to take up studios at Norton Priory Museum and Gardens: having visited the site as a child the memory of the archeological processes she witnessed have made a deep impression upon her and her practice. Trying to make large-scale installations without a dedicated space had been extremely difficult and limiting; the new space signaled a burst of new works and gave Sarah the added impetus to pursue her MA. It also enabled the development of new pastel works and new links with the local industry that so inspired her.

The joy of getting to know the Priory site again led to new interactions and works that responded to the ever changing environment. The latest work Head-Land takes this to new levels and will relate mutually with the launch of the Kitchen Gallery’s Open Season for 2005.

As well as creating her artwork, Sarah often works in community and educational settings and enjoys exploring themes of identity, memory and collection with the public.