Sarah Praill, Angsty Titanium Moth Owl, 2025, Oil on board, 14x19cm

Statement

Sarah Praill explores ways of embedding ‘presence’ within a surface through drawing, painting, print making and small sculptural objects. It is an archaeology of feeling and locating. A mark feels like a letter in the landscape of encoded things.

She recently became a grandmother which has informed her recent work. She has been exploring painting with oil on different grounds. Adding and taking away to build a surface with thin and thick layers of oil paint. Impulse, touch, gesture, colour and mark. A holding space for buried things. It’s an excavation of sorts.

Biography

Sarah Praill grew up in the Midlands and gained her BA in design and illustration at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. She studied Medieval History at Durham University and completed her Masters in Fine Art at The University of the Arts, London in 2011. She drew for many years in the British Museum with The Royal Drawing School and loves ancient markers across time of birth, life and death. She is drawn to chalky off white grounds, inscriptions, Greek funerary pots, ancient goddess figures, pink walls and the incisions on neolithic pots. She joined HAUSPRINT Print Studio in Stockwell in 2017 and completed three years on the Turps Correspondence Course. She will join the Turps Off Site Programme in September. She was awarded an a-n Artist Bursary to study fresco techniques in Sardinia. Her print works were selected for last years Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair.

Her career as a book designer with the fine art publisher Thames and Hudson informs her thinking. She has three daughters and lives in South London.