Sarah Jane Richards
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Biography
Sarah Jane Richards is a Welsh artist based on the Wirral Peninsula. She holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking from Leeds Beckett University, and has undertaken additional studies at the Cyprus School of Art and the Universitat de Belles Artes in Barcelona. Her multidisciplinary practice spans painting, drawing, installation, and curatorial work, with research interests rooted in mental health, environmental issues, and embodied experience.
Her professional practice includes significant contributions to arts-and-environment collaborations. She co-led a Heritage Lottery Funded commission with the Sefton Coast Landscape Partnership, creating six site-specific sculptures along the Sefton Coastal Path, and was a core artist in the national Back from the Brink programme, supporting threatened species through community-engaged arts events.
Alongside her studio practice, Sarah Jane teaches on the Fine Art BA (Hons) at Liverpool Hope University and works within arts and health contexts. She is a core artist for Creative Alternatives, an award-winning Arts on Prescription programme delivered by The ALEF Trust, supporting individuals experiencing anxiety, stress, and depression across the North West. She has also been commissioned to develop and facilitate arts projects in hospital settings, working within a transdisciplinary framework that foregrounds individual, community, environmental, and socio-structural wellbeing.
She is co-curator of the international exhibition series DRAWING(PAPER)SHOW and is interested in dialogue, collaboration, and the exchange of ideas to explore and expand contemporary approaches to making.
Artist Statement
My practice is grounded in the act of paying attention: to place, to movement, and to the shifting relationship between the body and the environment. Through painting, drawing, walking, and installation, I explore how embodied consciousness intertwines with landscape, and how moments in time can be translated into marks, gestures, and spatial experiences. Rather than depicting nature naturalistically, I treat my works as indices of lived encounters: traces of walking, meditating, observing, and being present.
Drawing sits at the core of my practice, not only as a visual language but as a spatial and philosophical inquiry. I approach markmaking as a form of embodied mapping, a way of tracing thought, movement, and ecological presence. Influenced by the literary landscapes of Robert Macfarlane, the ecological perspectives of George Monbiot, and the psychogeographic inquiries of Rebecca Solnit, my work engages with terrain as a site of memory, speculation, and transformation. Marks become paths; surfaces become fields of inquiry. Lines operate as gestures that articulate not only form, but also experience, absence, and the unseen.
I am particularly interested in drawing as a three-dimensional encounter, as a mode of spatial inscription that parallels the experience of moving through landscape. In this sense, my work operates as a critical analogue to geological strata, botanical growth, and the architectures of the natural world, while simultaneously refracting these references through subjective memory, markmaking, and poetic observation. By integrating walking and drawing, and by creating drawing installations, I aim to reveal the physical and temporal dimensions of perception, inviting viewers to consider their own relationship with place, presence, and ecological responsibility.
Across all areas of my practice, I see art as a catalyst for connection: between human and more than human beings, between environments, and between inner and outer worlds. My ongoing research into nature connectedness and the environmental concerns continues to shape this work, positioning drawing as both an embodied act and a form of ecological attention, a way of imagining how we might inhabit the world with greater care, reciprocity, and awareness.
Statement of Intent
During this three-week residency, I intend to explore the relationship between drawing and walking, using Bidston Hill as a primary site of inquiry. Walking has long been central to my practice as a way of thinking, sensing, and gathering; here, I aim to deepen this connection by developing a body of work that emerges directly from repeated walks, embodied observation, and responsive markmaking.
Working in a large studio space will allow me to expand the scale and physicality of my drawings, experiment with installation-based approaches, and test how drawing can operate as a spatial encounter rather than a purely two-dimensional form. I am particularly interested in how movement through landscape can translate into gesture, rhythm, and structure, and how these processes might evolve when given room to unfold across walls, floors, or constructed environments.
A key part of my intention is to work collaboratively and conversationally. I look forward to developing work alongside Colette and Jon, sharing ideas, processes, and critical dialogue. I am also keen to open up conversations around drawing with the public and with other artists through informal discussions, group crits, and shared making. These exchanges will form an important part of the residency, helping to shape the direction of the work and broaden the inquiry into how drawing can function as a communal, reflective, and exploratory practice.
