Sara Willett

Sara Willett creates detailed, multi-layered paintings experimenting with rhythm, metamorphosis, space, and illusion. Her highly patterned abstract paintings provide immersive, sensory experiences with the power to transport viewers to new aesthetic realms.

Sara Willett’s Influences and Style

Sara graduated from Camberwell College of Art with a BA in Painting and an MA in Fine Art. She has a Foundation Diploma from Sir John Cass. Her painting process consists of systematic repetition and reflective experience, with triangular, circular, and cell-like forms competing for space on her canvas. The artist creates flowing scenes of compulsive shapes and patterns, often working in opposition to the rhythms of the underlying layers to create visual tensions and dynamic movement.

Sara uses symbolic, decorative imagery to tease the boundary between abstraction and the figurative, taking inspiration from diverse sources; fabrics, mosaics, Chinese landscape painting, Flemish primitive painting, micro/macro biology, sci-fi and pseudo-science, and traditional domestic and quotidian crafts.

Exhibitions and Commissions

Sara regularly exhibits her paintings in the UK, Europe, and Japan. She has been commissioned multiple times, including for Deptford X, London’s longest-running contemporary art festival. Sara has participated in several awarded and fully supported residencies: at Da Wang Culture Highland in China in 2013 and 2015, and a further residency with Being 3 Gallery in Beijing in 2016. The latter culminated in a solo exhibition, China Web, at the gallery in the same year. In 2017, the Sunny International Art Prize shortlisted a selection of Sara’s work. You can also find her artwork in collections around the UK, USA, Australia, Japan, and Europe.