Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery is extremely pleased to announce that Sarah St. Lawrence has been named as the Gallery’s new featured artist and she will now be promoted by the gallery for the next 14 days in the gallery’s Artist Showcase.
Sarah is an award-winning photographer based in Canada. Sarah was selected as 1 of the top twelve finalists in the gallery’s 14th Solo Art Exhibition Series. The placement in this competition qualified her art to be showcased in this feature.
Sarah’s Artist Showcase feature will be promoted to over 350+ major news outlets, with inclusion on Google News & Bing News. In addition, the gallery will also be featuring and promoting her artwork in the gallery’s various social media networks for further exposure.
Below are Sarah’s Artist Biography, Artist Statement and 5 images that were submitted to this competition.
Artist Biography
Sarah St. Lawrence is a Canadian based artist, most frequently working in the medium of Photography. Hailing from St. Catharines, Ontario, she found herself drawn to “West Coast Living” in 2004, and relocated to Victoria, British Columbia where she still resides. A Ukrainian background, on her mother’s side, led Sarah to learn and pursue traditional Ukrainian Egg Design in her twenties. Her passion for traditional crafts like this and others, including crochet and knitting, offer fuel for some of her photographic works.
The beauty surrounding “the feminine” and her love for the female nude are a major theme in many of Sarah’s photography and paintings. In her photographic “Egg Series” Sarah uses her own body, egg art, and eye to capture these images, later publishing both Creation and Genesis from this work. Although she studied Fine Arts at the University of Guelph, Canada, from 1999-2000, most of her education stems from less-formal training. She was pleased to be asked to participate in Light, Space, Time’s 9th Annual “All Women” Online Art Competition for January, and looks forward to continuing to build her photography career.
In her spare time, she writes poetry (publishing her first poetry book, From Dark To Light, in 2016), continues to create music and expand deeper into Classical guitar, and designs knit and crochet items for sale, as well as spins wool by spindle and wheel. She has held an Independent Studio Practice in British Columbia since her relocation to B.C., and her work can be found in private collections though out North America. Although strongly drawn to the Visual Arts, Sarah’s other main interest lies in the Healing Arts and, when not engaging in various creative pursuits, she can be found delving into and continually learning about herbalism, energy medicine, aromatherapy and yoga. In her spare time, she blends these two interests by creating natural and medicinal products for retail.
Artist Statement
Within the confines of my creative work, my objective is to merge the duality, experienced by the conscious mind of humankind, into one internal space, thereby assuaging fears—caused by perceived separation—and fostering new feelings of connectivity. In the creation of my art, I am interested in examining how seemingly unrelated forces, deemed in opposition, are actually mutually supportive, at a fundamental level.
I am intuitively moved most often towards first finding, and then creating a photo/piece—striking a balance between the unadulterated, and my own creative input. I find that unifying documentary and expressive approaches operates as a means to convey a greater truth.
I often (but not always) find myself utilizing “found” lighting, and approach this (initially) by employing minimal involvement with lighting or objects, to enhance the quality of “found spaces” and adhere to the environmental location/conditions already presented. I find a greater integrity for what I am aiming to produce, with this “non” method and approach; intuition is kept open to other avenues of information, and the original feeling/impulse that brought me to the space, is maintained.
I enjoy exploring universal concepts, and cosmic patterns (as above, so below) and take particular interest in how these cosmic forces influence modern day societal discord. I feel modern society’s excessive interest in over-expansion, is causing a subsequent disconnect from the Whole, leading to feelings of isolation.
I can experience disintegration from the Whole as a movement towards photographic metaphoric or poetic “microscopy”, undoing the Gestalt found when a modern fast-paced society blurs details, thus, losing focus. In studying these spaces of disconnect, I find greater truths are revealed in small spaces, be it small in meaning (and often unnoticed), or size. Often these spaces of observation—studying the small to know the large—present truth as a gateway to change: a concept I wish to express in my art. And in doing so, I seek to make harmonious, that which is commonly seen as disjunct.
My objective is to allow my art to serve as a metaphoric reminder of common cosmic truths or unifying concepts, encouraging those who feel they are in a space of disconnect, to seek to find solace in similarities and parallels between things normally viewed in opposition, and in doing so, confirm “similarity” as the glue that hosts and holds “opposites” together. Through my work, I have discovered that opposites become complements to a system in balance, and we as society and embodied beings are, at our most healthful, designed for the “middle path”, and so must pursue a balanced life in order to thrive in all facets.
My art often informs me of the weakening of the over-indulged Patriarchal forces, and thus, I am frequently reminded of this one key element of interconnectedness: how each “thing” at its extreme becomes its opposite. In tandem to these feelings runs the concept of the lost female force/power in modern times, exemplified by softness, stillness, solitude, respite, darkness, quietude, substance, nourishment, and beauty for beauty’s sake. I find my art often informs me of the rising tide of this overdue force, as it takes its rightful place from a position of begging to one of insistence.
Sarah’s website is www.sarahstlawrencegallery.com.
