Sarah Tomlinson West Midlands, United Kingdom
Sarah Tomlinson is a textile and mixed media artist based in Birmingham. Over the past two years she has been exploring a theme of ageing as part of a City and Guilds Diploma course. Coming from a background of mental health Sarah is interested in how to visually portray emotions and abstract concepts. Her work explores layers of identity and memory.
Sarah's work seeks to explore ways in which abstract concepts can be portrayed visually by the use of colour , shape and texture. Over the two year course Sarah became increasingly interested in layers and how our outward self is shaped by both the layers of internal experiences and external events. This led to the beginning of a series of mixed media masks which are based on the bark of trees she has studied in her local park. During one course work module Sarah discovered an old map of Birmingham with a ring road called Paradise Circus – now demolished. It looks like a brain cell – and she based a small piece called Neural Networks on it. She is now using it as a repeated motif on a large abstract wall hanging entitled Fragments of my Mind. The motif symbolises Sarah’s years as a student in Birmingham, when she used to catch the bus to Paradise Circus in the City Centre - it is a lost road, much as our earlier life is lost and changed. The move into abstraction is challenging as it relies on letting a piece of work evolve rather than being able to plan it out. Once the course is over Sarah is looking forward to developing these concepts using some of the many ideas which the coursework generated along the way.
Artwork
Neural Network, Textile, 2024