Having
spent three years making light 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 Sarah 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 devastating
their history is in relation to the environment. These ubiquitous
buildings are often almost invisible to us, or viewed as an
eyesore, yet their impact on our lives is everywhere.”
Sarah Nicholson, 2001
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