Sarah Murray’s practice brings together earlier work exploring an embodied experience of landscape with current investigations into the sublime, spirituality and sin, all rendered through their distinctive gestural abstraction. Working in acrylic and oil, Murray’s paintings examine the painterly tensions between figuration and representation through layering, shifting grounds, expressive mark-making and a vibrant use of colour.

Drawing on references to religious art-historical painting as a point of departure, Murray creates compositions that are both vivid and visceral. Earlier works emerged from an embodied engagement with landscape, often developed en plein air and shaped by the space, place and temporality of the environment. Murray now extends this visual language to explore the interplay of the sublime and the grotesque, as well as themes of sin and spirituality in art history, translating these concerns through the lens of personal experience.