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The Art of Sarah
Richards
Written by Carin Goodwin
In looking
at the art of Sarah Richards it sometimes surprises me that the blues are not
painted with bits of the sky, the oranges with moments of a sunset, the greens
with the essences of grass and the reds not with the blood of enemies or loved
ones. It surprises me that, captured in the bronzes of dancing people and other
animals, there are not actual little, captured spirits of these things. The
work of Sarah Richards is nothing less than supremely intimate. It never fails
to appear to be about someone’s most private experiences.
When art
becomes this personal it puts itself at risk of sentiment. Richards avoids this
pitfall by her, nearly academic, dedication to technique. The combination of
such an intimate subject matter and commitment to technical application yields
a very interesting tension for the observer. On one hand it is inevitable that
one should wonder, on observing one of the numerous bronzes or paintings
produced by Ms Richards, at what the artist must have experienced to have made
such a work. But this wondering is perfectly intercepted by amazement at
brushstrokes and use of colour or the particular texture of, for instance,
feathers in bronze. The art is commanding on many levels.
It becomes
apparent that there has been some sort of process for the artist in getting to
the end product. And this process, clearly, is not exclusively the production
of the pieces. The process seems to have preceded the eventual picking up of
brush and paint and moulding wax or clay. When water is made red and only
specifically chosen parts of the body are placed in the picture and tiny
figures are barely seen in a vast expanse of something fluid it evokes
curiosity. It is in times like these that we can, legitimately and without fear
of cliché, pull from the sleeve all the profundity around meaning and
existence. Questions about identity, belonging and alienation suddenly become
relevant in a genuine way. Richards’ art revives, in the most graceful of
manners, questions which have held our interest since before the Greeks were
doing their thing.
If you have
ever grappled with issues around truth then you may find, in the work Sarah Richards,
some respite. Not because it gives the answers but because it suggests the
vehicle for getting to such answers. The work is a celebration of an inward
journey and it can therefore not provide objective solutions to ancient
riddles. The suggestion, I think, is that answers to such questions are found
in getting naked in the light of day, in feeling the temperature of water in the
palm of your hand, in taking leave of the rock, in dancing with your eyes
closed and in the shape of someone’s particular body.
It is most
definitely work of a sensual nature.
The process
of which it speaks is that of the heart and body. The intellectual stuff is
reached incidentally- but can be so nevertheless. If existentialism wanted to
have its way with Ms Richards’ work it would have to bow, first, to the triumph
of sensation over thought, of feelings over analysis, of the body over the mind
and, finally, the human spirit over human rationale. Only then would the
foundations be laid for understanding the criteria for real existence. And then
only if the spectator is willing to traverse deserts made of colour, figures made
of light and shadow and light made of a hundred different pigments.
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