Click on photo for interview, To carry a feeling, November 2024
Sarah Praill explores ways of embedding ‘presence’ within a surface through drawing, painting, print making and small sculptural objects. It is an archaeology of feeling and locating. A mark feels like a letter in the landscape of encoded things. She often make iterations of the same motif arranging them together like a paragraph or a sentence.
She thinks about the space around a thing; like the air or oxygen around a letter when you look at the kerning between two letters. Motifs become part of her own vocabulary. Writing an image into being. Recently she has been finding images slowly, in small steps over an extended period of time. Adding and taking away to build a surface with thin and thick layers of oil paint. Impulse, touch, gesture, colour and mark. A holding space for buried things. It’s an excavation of sorts.
Sarah Praill grew up in the Midlands and studied design and illustration at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. She studied Medieval History at Durham University and completed her Masters in Fine Art at The University of the Arts, London in 2011. She drew for many years every Friday in the British Museum with The Royal Drawing School and loves ancient markers across time of birth, life and death. She is drawn to chalky off white grounds, inscriptions, Greek funerary pots, ancient goddess figures, pink walls and the incisions on neolithic pots. She joined HAUSPRINT Print Studio in Stockwell in 2017 and is a founding member of Hyphae Drawing Collective. She did three years on Turps Correspondence Course and will join the Turps Off site programme in September 2025. She was awarded an a-n Artist Bursary to study fresco techniques in Sardinia.
Her career as a book designer with the fine art publisher Thames and Hudson informs her thinking. She recently designed Drawing in the Present Tense; by Roger Malbert and Claire Gilman, Chief Curator of The Drawing Center, New York. She designed Ways of Drawing for The Royal Drawing School and The Quentin Blake Book. She has three daughters and lives in South London.
e-mail: sarahpraill@icloud.com
Instagram: @sarahpraill
@unprimed_collective
Solo show
2024 To carry a feeling, Hausprint Studios, Stockwell
Group shows
2025 Split 3, Candid Arts Trust, Islington
Time to time, Safehouse, Peckham
Split 2, Cross Street Arts, Wigan
Split, Us together, The Dispensary Gallery , Wrexham
2024 SFSA Painting Open, No Format Gallery, Deptford
Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair
Side by side, HB drawing at No format gallery, Deptford
Layers, Unprimed Collective, The Department Store, Brixton
Mischief, Safehouse, Peckham
Lick, Safehouse, Peckham
2023 Under their skin, One Paved Court, London
Do not swallow, Safehouse, Peckham
On the Edge, Cromer Art Space
Drawing is free, Ten Years, Paris College of Art
Project Babel, Galleria Ratamo Jyväskylä, Finland
2022 Material Presence, Fitzrovia Gallery, London
2021 Between two doors, Watford Museum
Letting in Settle, Hyphæ Drawing Collective, Touchbase Gallery, Folkstone
Spooky Action at a distance, Delhi, India
2020 Counterweave Arts, Rome
2019 Ty Pawb Print International
Ninth, Open Studios, Stockwell
2018 Plus one, Slaughterhaus
2016 Borderlines, Slaughterhaus
2015 National Original Print Exhibition Bankside
Evidencing, RK Burt, Bermondsey
2011 Double the Vision My Eyes Do See, The Three Stags, Lambeth
2010 HMV Curzon Moving Image South
Tarradiddle, Artspace, Hackney, London
Close but No Cigar, ICA, London
I Swore I Sore, MA Interim Show, The Nunnery, Bows Arts Trust
Deutsche Post Bank
2006 Drawing from Turner, Tate Britain, London
Residencies, Awards and Publications
2023 a-n Artists Bursary Roman and Pomepian fresco techniques Bosa, Sardinia
2022 Drawing is free: vol I https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UvMes6U6sf_Zi95nPFi-X6VZBa0xukfI/view
2021 Grow https://issuu.com/drawing_correspondence_program/docs/drawing_correspondence-_grow
2021 Drawing Correspondence Pilot Project with Anita Taylor, Tania Kovats and Chloe Briggs
2020 A Glass Envelope, International Residency
2020 Nanpur, Orissa teaching
2019 Bothy Artist Residency, Aviemore, Scotland
2019 Mind Environment Pioneer, Languedoc, France
2012 Intaglio print prize, National Open Print Exhibition, Bankside
2010 Surreal House, Barbican, London
1988 Sandberg Prize
Artist talks and workshops
2024 To carry a feeling, interview/talk at Hausprint Studio, Stockwell
2021 Bezalel Academy of Art, Jerusalem
2020 Teaching Art and creativity in Nanpur, Orissa
2018 Monoprinting workshop Slaughterhaus
2010 Colchester MA, Book Design
2008 Ulster Festival of the Arts, University of Ulster
2007 Narrative and the Image, Bezalel Academy of Art, Jerusalem