Mairi Alice Dun in Conversation with Artist Sarah Adams
Sarah Adams is a sea cave painter preparing for her tenth solo exhibition at the Maas Gallery in Mayfair this October, where she remains the gallery’s only living artist. Originally from Jersey, Adams relocated to Cornwall 20 years ago and has since focused on its coastline, particularly the intertidal zones and sea caves. Working in a traditional manner, she never paints from photographs, instead building her canvases from on-site sketches and studies. Her large oil paintings often comprise up to 30 layers, reflecting both geological structure and the shifting conditions of the sea. Her practice mirrors the coastline she paints, walking the line between structure and chaos in both method and theme.
Sarah Adams in her studio. Photo courtesy: Harmony Murt.
Mairi Alice Dun: Can you describe your practice?
Sarah Adams: It is very old fashioned. I take sketchbooks and small studies on site. Technically, I use a lot of my palette knife. Also, I have a liking for very traditional, or traditionally made, pigments. Things like Williamsburg, where the colours have not been homogenized. Each colour has its own identity, because they are very traditionally made. So, you know they have a complete personality, either being very earthy or very lake-y. They have a huge variety in tinting power.
MAD: Do the ‘personalities’ of the colours influence you when working on site?
SA: I do occasionally work in oil on site, but most of my work is coastal, and most of it is in the intertidal zone—in a section of the coast which is between the high and low tide points. So of course, it's time sensitive. It's also sometimes quite difficult to get to, and I tend to find that it's better to be there with a goal: which is to gather as much information as I can. So, when I’m on site I tend to work in water soluble crayon or dry media—pencil sketches, colour studies. I do occasionally work en plein air, but I'm not a plein air painter. For me, that is a different discipline.
But in the studio, because I'm painting a lot of rock and geology it is important to be painting the Earth with earthen colours. I think the thing with traditionally made paint, apart from the fact that the pigment quality is extraordinary, is that you're constantly finding new ways to use it. You might have seven mucky greens on the palette or available to you, and they all behave in completely different ways. What it looks like when it's squeezed out of the tube is not how it's going to behave.
And then, I like mixing across the palette. As I said I am very traditional so I don't use black. I mix black, but a lot of the sort of subtle tones come from mixing across something like an Ultramarine pink and a Courbet green, or, if you want to go lighter, a Cobalt Violet Light and a Terre Verte, and those sort of nuances that you get. And so, you've got two muddy greens, but if you mix them with one of those sort of warm tones, it will behave differently too.
Sarah Adams, Chapel Porth, oil on linen, 150 x 90cm. Photo courtesy: the artist and Trevor Burrows.
MAD: Would you say your approach to painting is scientific?
SA: Oh, gosh, I don't know about that. Actually, it sort of mirrors my subject matter. Because what I really like about my subject is that it has a structure and a rationale to it. The rocks are formed in a certain way. They're made of something which behaves in a certain way. But then you've got this chaos flung at it. You know, the sea will erode cliffs in a certain way. It will look for weaknesses, and then it will work into those. There's a sort of this naturalness and sweep of the way that things fit together, which is to some extent controlled by their nature, and to another extent, completely chaotic.
I'm very interested in geometry. I'm very interested in composition and all of those formal things—I'm very interested in the technical aspects of making paintings. But all of that said, when you're actually working, the real key to it is those times where you stop thinking about all of that. There's this thing that happens; there's serendipity. There are things that have happened subconsciously, and when you take a step back and assess what's going on your own work surprises you. You see things that you didn't see before, and then that leads you on to a new place, a place that you couldn't have imagined.
MAD: What is the role of these intertidal spaces in your works, and what brought you to them?
SA: There's this sense of trespass when you go to these places. As a child, you'd go, and every day it's sort of freshly minted, because the sea has come and gone. I mean, it's almost bad for us in a way, that we think the sea is going to make everything right. We think that we can treat it like an adventure playground, or as a resource, or as a dumping ground, and somehow everything will be fine—and it really won't. But, there is this sense of this specialness in that as well. So the sand will be composed in a different way, or the water will be running down the beach in a different way, or things will move quite radically sometimes. There's this constant state of flux. But again, there's that structure, because—tidal waves and tsunamis apart—you know what the tide is going to do. And so there is, again, this sort of order-and-chaos thing going on.
The other thing, however, is that it's revealing something as the sea is eroding the cliffs. It's taking slices through that geology and so you're seeing something revealed that normally you would be unaware of, right? Cornwall has got a high tidal range. Some of the places I go to you can only get to once a year. There are just two or three days a year with extra, extra low tides, and if that's combined with a high pressure weather event, you can get an extra eight inches of space. High pressure can depress sea level even more so suddenly you can reach nooks and crannies that you couldn't otherwise.
Sarah Adams, Song-of-the-Sea, oil on linen, 150 x 90cm. Photo courtesy: the artist and Trevor Burrows.
MAD: When you go to these spaces, what are you looking for in terms of composition or mood?
SA: I think it changes because I've been working from some of these places and subjects for 20 years now. So, of course, I'm seeing a process of change. In my new show there's a small amount of work which is starting to explore those changes. Because sometimes you see radical change, but then you also can walk down there with your own preoccupations that you may not even be aware of. So a body of work may have a particular focus, which only becomes apparent as the work grows and interrelates, but the same rock formation can keep giving, because you'll go down there, and things that things have changed, and you find a different viewpoint, you see something else, and off you go again.
I think there's this combination of the two things. Certainly form is really important. My colour is naturalistic in for the most part, but I am interested in finding colour in the geology. Cornwall's coast is really interesting because the geology. It was sedimentary rock, basically minding its own business, and then about 400 million years ago you started getting this massive volcanic activity which created the Moors, and it metamorphosed the rock around it. That's when the mineral content changed, or changed its nature. It's been mined since the Bronze Age.
So, you go along cliffs, and it may be that they're all sort of fairly gray with white ports running through, and then suddenly you get all this colour where you've got a mineralized seam. Then, of course, that Land’s End greenish is there as well. You've got some parts of cliffs which are an amazing, sort of pinky orange. So, you've got a lot of colour there, if you care to look for it.
MAD: With global warming affecting the coastline, do you try to capture those changes in your work?
SA: It's definitely a document. I mean, some of those very, very low tide places I mentioned, they may not be as accessible in the future. There are places that are less accessible even now, simply because a large weather event has removed a whole section of cliff. Those sorts of things are already happening.
I'm just starting a project which is about documenting: finding archival material (of coastal spaces, postcards for example) and then revisiting and doing drawings about what's there now. That is just in its infancy. For instance, there are two paintings in my show coming up of an arch which used to be a cave with two entrances. It was quite a large area which was covered over and you used to be able to wander into. I've been painting it for 15 years or more, then one wild spring, I went round the corner and found just a tiny bit hanging on, and a massive, massive amount had fallen in.
Sarah Adams, Three Arches, Perranporth, oil on linen, 60 x 150cm. Photo courtesy: the artist and Trevor Burrows.
MAD: Does the ephemeral nature of these spaces create a sense of urgency in your work?
SA: I think that's always a part of it. Urgency. Documenting. When we make paintings, we want to say to people: Look at this. This is special. This is something extraordinary.
Sarah Adams will be exhibiting her latest work at the Maas Gallery from October 8th to 24th of this year.
Thank you on behalf of MADE IN BED to Sarah Adams and Sharon Keene.
Mairi Alice Dun
Editor-In-Chief, MADE IN BED