Sarah Lees is a landscape artist based in Wales. Her compositions are almost empty of human presence, showing only the raw design left behind: stripped back boundaries, thickets, tracks and detail. Her practise is preoccupied with the edge of the land where cultivation and wildness coincide, and she revisits favourite places repeatedly to capture what makes the landscape so compelling. Carmarthenshire and the Towy Valley where she lives is a significant source of inspiration. Lees views the fields and hedgerows around her neighbourhood as a microcosm, representing a small glimpse into a much larger world: their existential struggle, universal.
Her visual language is stripped back through use of a restricted palette so the paintings become short phrases articulated clearly, sometimes exploring more complex motifs. Lees has also recently introduced birds and nests, bringing a kind of sacredness to her understanding of what landscape means.