New Directions: Sara Hughes

Sara Hughes has spent two decades transforming civic spaces. In her most recent show, she turns inward, mounting a generous inquiry into artistic inheritance and the women artists who continue to guide her vision.

Words | Dina Jezdić
Photography | Sam Hartnett

 

For more than two decades, Sara Hughes has painted in colour, rhythm, and light. Her abstractions have transformed walls, glass, and civic spaces into expansive fields of luminous structure. In Colour Memories, her recent exhibition at Gow Langsford, Hughes turns that outward energy inward, retracing the pigments, influences, and visual memories that shaped her, revealing the intimate foundations beneath the clarity and confidence of her work.

Developed over several years and arriving on the cusp of a milestone birthday, Colour Memories marks a profound turning point, shifting Hughes from the outward momentum of her large-scale site-responsive projects toward a smaller-scale, more contemplative, research-driven exploration of memory and influence. At its heart is a dialogue with the women artists who have shaped her imagination: Gretchen Albrecht, Mina Arndt, Jacqueline Fahey, Rosalie Gascoigne, Frances Hodgkins, Agnes Martin, Séraphine Pick, and Bridget Riley. Each becomes a catalyst for Hughes to reconsider her own visual language, a practice built from encounters, mentorships, and the slow accumulations that form an artist’s vocabulary.

“Looking back over your practice, you think about the people who have been important in your life,” Hughes reflected. “You’re always carrying a library of imagery — other artists’ work, the places you’ve lived, experiences you’ve had. I wanted to acknowledge those people in different ways.”

Rather than quoting these artists, Hughes attunes herself to the conditions of their paintings: the atmospheres they conjured, the emotional undertones of their palettes, the internal logic of their compositions. Colour becomes a vessel for memory, a single hue capable of summoning a childhood home, a painting revisited with her grandmother, or the quiet charge of encountering a work alone.

Colour Memories is a generous inquiry into artistic inheritance: how influence moves across time, how women learn from one another, and how a painter locates her own voice through tracing echoes of those who came before. “In the end, the selection came from a personal place,” Hughes explained. “These women shaped me not just stylistically but through particular paintings or encounters that were deeply affecting. It felt important to place myself in an even conversation with them.”

The exhibition signals a pivotal evolution in Hughes’s practice — a merging of her signature abstraction with a deeply introspective mapping of formative forces. Memory becomes structure, lineage becomes colour. Colour Memories reveals an artist working with assurance, laying bare a process of continual recombination in which experience gathers, simmers, and surfaces anew. Here, generosity and authority coexist, influence deepens into kinship, and the past remains present — steady, insistent, still speaking.

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First published in Art Collector issue #115 (January–March 2026).