Sarah L Stewart’s restrained observations on life range from her movements between residences to interactions with the landscape. This time they take a more global political bent.
The forms within the square remain the same. They are walls and rectangles, suspended, strung between each other, patinated and abraded, revealing previous iterations and false starts. Once these ruins of actions agreed and sometimes taken might have belonged on a tourist holiday to an archaeological site, to Pompeii or Chitzen Itza but now their familiarity is from our screens. Live drone shots of an air war in progress are interspersed with great meeting halls where legislators and representatives make decisions that turn homes into ruins.
In global contemporary art great maker Anselm Kiefer comments on the physical devastation of war on a monumental scale with giant canvasses and stacked debris towers in an aircraft hanger. For a thoughtful and compassionate artist such as Sarah L Stewart the means are inevitably restrained but the effect is as powerful.
These paintings are small in scale, painted by an artist who draws on her life’s experience to make parallels between words and decisions used in bureaucracy and images and technology used in warfare. This is intelligent painting for the compassionate viewer.
