Can you tell us about your practice and background?
My name is Sara Bowen. I’m a visual artist and teacher based on the Mid North Coast. I was born in the UK, but I’ve lived in Australia for twenty years- I’m not sure whether I’m Scottish, English, Australian or a mixture of all three! I’ve been making things and drawing since I was old enough to pick up a pencil, and I now hold post-graduate qualifications in fine art and multidisciplinary printmaking. I have been working professionally as a visual artist for the last twenty-five years.
Image: Artist Sara Bowen. Photo supplied.
I was the first person in my family to finish high school, and my parents weren’t happy about the idea of me doing art at all. I didn’t think I’d get into university to do an academic subject, so we made a bargain: I’d apply to university for a place to do an academic degree (which I didn’t think I’d get), but I’d also apply to art school to do art. Of course, I got offers for both, and my mother was SO angry when I turned down a really good university to accept a place at art school! She kept me up all night, telling me that I could do art anytime, but this was my only chance to go to university and…I caved in, gave up my place at art school and went to that university instead
It took me a long time to come back around to being an artist. In between, I did an entrepreneurship course sponsored by The Prince’s Trust and set up the first of several businesses, making hand-painted silk lingerie (still creative!). I subsequently worked for IBM as a cryptographic programmer, set up a software consultancy, worked in business mentoring, started working in education, and had kids! Then, in quick succession, I trained as a printmaker, gained formal post-graduate art qualifications, and moved to Coffs Harbour with my (Australian) husband and our two children. We have been here ever since.
Printmaking underpins a lot of my creative work. I trained in copperplate etching, bookbinding, and papermaking, and I love the idea that someone like Rembrandt could walk into my studio and still make a print because the underlying technology hasn’t changed in 500 years. The trick is in combining age-old techniques with contemporary ideas to make work that is relevant today.
Making art for me is like thinking- making things helps me to sort out how I feel about things and always involves a lot of research.
There are two parts to my arts practice: one half is in the form of artist books, which are a weird hybrid, multidisciplinary thing that sits in between painting, drawing, sculpture and book forms. It’s hard to describe, but the one thing they are not is ‘just books’! I have made artist books that are boats, bridges, balloons, and towers, as well as some with a more traditional format. The artist books tend to be more intimate and enable me to reflect on things that have happened in my life, such as early traumas and relationships. I often come to a new understanding of things I remember through the process of creating an artist book. The other half of my practice, in the form of larger installations, paintings, and drawings, revolves around broader issues I’m thinking about, such as refugees, the landscape, and environmental issues, and I can spend several years working on each body of work. I can’t imagine not thinking about things. I can’t imagine not making art.
Can you tell us about the work you presented and the story or concept behind it?
I’m currently thinking a lot about the air we breathe, what’s in it, and how it connects us. Last year, I was lucky enough to exhibit at YAM with Christine Courcier-Jones and Penelope Lawry, and the starting place for all three of us was the idea of the infiltration of the outside world into the pristine spaces of the new gallery. I took air samples around the gallery and the rest of the new building and grew the resulting yeasts, moulds, fungi and so on, which gave me a visual departure point for the rest of the work. I am fascinated by the idea that all humans breathe the same air- we are connected by it, just as surely as all the continents are connected by a single body of water. We breathe it all in- bacteria, smoke particles, fungi, moulds, atoms of everything that has lived its life on our planet- and we breathe out our own unique signature breath from the individual microbiome of our lungs.
I am fascinated by the idea that all humans breathe the same air- we are connected by it, just as surely as all the continents are connected by a single body of water.
Image: Airborne is from my exhibition at YAM and is based on my research into air quality. Photo supplied.
I made monotype prints based on the air samples and large-scale mobile sculptures that collect together all the different things I find in the air and enable them to move in space around us. It took a while to develop the physical format of the sculptures, and I had to solve a lot of practical problems along the way. For one thing, they kept growing, and I kept running out of room for them in my studio. In the end, I cobbled together a highly unsafe structure made from ladders perched on top of chairs, with a 5m metal pole slung between them, so I could make the mobiles to the size I wanted! Since then, the sculptures have ventured out of the studio into exhibitions, and I’ve been able to take that structure down and replace it with long poles attached to the ceiling, so that I can make the next generation of sculptures even larger…
What materials do you work with?
I work mainly with paper. I love it, and it holds such deep meanings. It is such a fragile thing, easily damaged and often abandoned. It takes care to preserve paper, but it also holds a lot of power: papers such as maps, official documents and ledgers carry information that people, often powerful people, chose to record, and so paper is part of the work of governments and powerful people to document and classify and sometimes dismiss individuals, whole landscapes and nations. I find what is recorded and what is not recorded, what survives and what does not survive, fascinating. It has parallels in what we remember and what we forget, personally and culturally.
I’ve loved paper since I was a small child, when fresh paper was rare and expensive, and the only paper I was allowed to draw on was the reverse side of computer printouts my father brought home from work or the backs of receipts. I guess I’ve worked with it for so long now that I feel I understand it, especially as I now have a Hollander beater and can make it for myself. I make hand-made paper and paper pulp for inclusion in my work, as well as hardcover sketchbooks and journals. Even when I’m painting, I’m still working on paper, as I hate painting on canvas, so I always mount the paper on board!
The other surface I love is slate. When I moved to Australia, I brought with me a box of early nineteenth-century roof slates which I’d found under our old house in the UK. By the time I brought them here, they’d already had several lives, starting as mud in a watery environment and being slowly compressed over millennia until they formed flat sheets of rock with evidence of plants and small creatures caught in their layers. Slate is an interesting material to work with, and I’ve printed on it, made holes in it, engraved it, eroded and gilded it for different bodies of work.
I often reuse materials that have had another life in my work. I make paper from old clothes, I include found materials in mixed media work, and I’m currently reusing plastics from packaging materials in my mobile sculptures, partly because of their qualities such as translucence, but also because I’ve been reading up about microplastics in the environment, including in the air. I want to give these materials a different kind of life.
How does it feel to be a mentor in the Shared Practice program?
I am delighted to be working with Arts Mid North Coast on the Shared Practice mentoring program. Mentoring is so valuable as a way of giving and gaining insights into the practicalities of being an artist in the world. I’m excited to be working with a bunch of talented people (mentors and mentees!), and I am very much looking forward to the visible outcome of the program, which will be an exhibition of the participants’ work in early 2028.
Mentoring is so valuable as a way of giving and gaining insights into the practicalities of being an artist in the world. I’m excited to be working with a bunch of talented people (mentors and mentees!)
Image: Prescription (2019) is a gouache painting which was a finalist in the 2019 STiLL award at Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery. Photo supplied.
It’s fantastic and also slightly nerve-wracking to be a mentor, but it does mean a lot professionally to be recognised as having accumulated enough experience to be able to share some of it with others. Having worked across printmaking, installation, artist books, and teaching, I hope to offer participants a breadth of perspectives on what a creative practice can look like. I’m very grateful for the opportunity, and I can’t wait to see what the participants do with the program!
How do you hope audiences will respond to your work?
First of all, I hope people enjoy the experience of looking at it and sometimes, walking through it or handling my work (depending on the piece!). I hope they are intrigued by it and are interested in finding out about the research and work that went into it, and why I made it, so they can look at it again and see it more fully. I always think artworks are a bit like children: you do the best you can with them, but eventually they go out into the world without you.
You’re not always going to be there to have a personal conversation with the audience. You hope the work is strong enough to convey what you were thinking, but you can’t always tell! Everyone will take away something different.
What’s next for you in your creative journey?
It has been an exciting year for showing work in new contexts. I’ve really enjoyed being part of Northern Exposure at The Glasshouse in Port Macquarie and Paper Universe at the State Library of NSW in Sydney, and I’m about to go to Alice Springs for the opening of The Alice Prize, which has selected one of my large-scale mobile sculptures. I’ve never been to Central Australia before, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the landscape out there- so different to coastal NSW!
In the studio, having looked at what’s in the everyday air that we breathe, I’m now looking at all the things we put in it as a result of our human activities.
Meanwhile, in the studio, having looked at what’s in the everyday air that we breathe, I’m now looking at all the things we put in it as a result of our human activities, from the by-products of industrial processes, such as radioactive gases and pollutants, to deliberate acts of poisoning.
Where can people find your work?
You can find more about my work at: