Sarah Emerson

Gallery Affiliations: Whitespace Gallery

Region: South

In my work I create highly stylized versions of nature, painting patterns visible in the natural world using pastel hues and poplike paint-by-number repetition. Inspired by subjects ranging from battlefields, war propaganda, literature, and idyllic gardens, I use the landscape as impression, abstraction, symbol, and sentiment. Each painting makes a fantastical analogy between an actual place and the myths and remnants of the real events associated with that place. Through the manipulation of scale and spatial relationships I twist motifs into flat emblems and shifting planes to create an artificial underworld where the memento mori is dressed up to camouflage a gaping darkness lurking beneath the surface.