Artist Statement

My practice revolves around creating works that evoke internal senses, subtle nuances, and rhythm. It sits alongside my everyday life, shaped by its constraints and interruptions.

Ranges of colour, marks and motifs extend a personal painterly vocabulary over time. These paintings reflect and respond to the fluctuating nature of life (with arthritis). The work is materially and emotionally layered, formed slowly through care and adjustment. The painted gestures are often small, fragmented and gradual. Painterly revisions accumulate on the canvas alongside traces of provisional marks rubbed away.

Biography

Sarah Cooney (b.1982 Stockton-on-Tees, UK) received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2008 where she was recipient of the Hugh Dunn Award from the Worshipful Company of Painter Stainers and a Greater London Area NAFADAS Bursary Award.

Selected exhibitions include: Working Lives, MIMA, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough (2024); No Last Dance, NCA, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (2024); Gallery North, Newcastle- upon-Tyne (2023); From Gesture to Geometry, Platform A Gallery, Middlesbrough (2022); A Generous Space 2, The New Art Gallery, Walsall (2022); To the Studio, Gallery DODO, Brighton (2022); Your Foot in my Face (curated by Dan Howard-Birt), Kingsgate Project Space, London (2021); Creekside Open Selected by Brian Griffiths, APT Gallery, London (2018); Beep Painting Prize Exhibition, Swansea College of Arts (2018).

In 2020 her painting ‘Evelina’ was acquired by MIMA, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art through the Tees Valley Response Collecting initiative. Her work has received recognition through various awards and nominations, such as being shortlisted for the Abbey Fellowship at the British School in Rome in 2011 and longlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2021 and 2023. In 2024, she was shortlisted for a Tees Valley Artists of the Year Award and also longlisted for the Beep Painting Biennial.