Sarah Lees: Edge Lands
For Sarah Lees, painting is both seeing and touching: a record of encounter where vision meets the felt memory of place, evoking a sensory depth that extends beyond sight.
This exhibition gathers Sarah Lees’ ongoing investigation into the shapes and traces left by centuries of human interaction with the land. Sarah’s enduring fascination with the edges of landscape reflects a dialogue between human intervention and natural wildness, resonating with wider themes in contemporary Welsh art concerning place, memory, and identity. Sarah’s paintings distil topographical forms—boundaries, furrows, river bends—into contemplative abstractions that speak of time and transformation. Her work explores the rural thresholds of West Wales — places where cultivated fields give way to wild thickets, where ancient stones rise from the earth, and where human traces fade into the rhythms of nature. Now based in rural Carmarthenshire, Sarah works primarily en plein air, translating direct encounters with these emptied landscapes into muted glazes and tactile imprints on panel. Her process—layering delicate oils, scratching back surfaces, and revisiting known sites—transforms observation into touch, light into texture. As in her quiet nod to Joyce’s Ulysses—“shut your eyes and see”—her paintings are invitations to perceive through presence rather than depiction.