Sarah Needham United Kingdom
Sarah Needham is a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art Painting MA programme. She is based in London in Kindred Studios in North Kensington. Her work is research based, ecologically sensitive, using sustainable oil paint using linseed oil egg yolk and chalk, like Rembrandt. She often uses recycled Atches huile cotton rag paper, and the pigments and so palette arises from her research.
While holding in our hands material pigments that were held in the hands of, or under the feet of, or in the clothes on the backs of people from the past, we hold lost voices across time in an entangled assemblage with the present. There is a way in which we touch and are touched, make change and are changed.
I am listening out for the voices that may not have made it to the official record, but that haunt the archives in their absence. The voices, and aliveness, both human and non human that can be found in material and in time touching time.
Rebecca Schneider talks of feeling a hail, and the space between the hail and response as a place where anything can happen…
I start with Palaeolithic pigments:-Some collected from the earth of the Lot while walking. Processed by hand while listening carefully. And there are the stories originating with Bataille that circulate, that write out female voices, female desire, female possibilities.
There is the counter evidence, of female footprints, hand prints, pigments in female hands and mouths, in hands and mouths where we do not know the gender, bone wear and breakages similar in all the adult skeletons found, evidence of equal nutrition and burial rights, that suggest a non gendered division of labour.
I bring this research to the work, it sets up the frame, and then without clear intent I start to work and make a mark, followed by another and the paintings come.
