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Welcome! Sara here...
Painting is my main practice. Originally, I painted in a traditional, figurative style, documenting landscapes, temples and other scenes around Kathmandu using water colours. I’d practiced with oil paints, and my master told me to concentrate on water-colours, in order to understand how colours combine. Later, I returned to oils and acrylic paints, which is what I mainly use – sometimes in conjunction with smoke – for my present work, which operates somewhere between representation and abstraction.
My paintings have developed by a meditative process of layering over time, and, today, show little resemblance to my early work, although I can still see links. Over the years, besides painting, I’ve experimented with other materials in installations, for instance, cotton wool, glass and mirrors. During Nepal’s decade-long Maoist uprising, I cycled across the country on a three-month tour titled “The 21st century is the Century of Art and Peace”, making over 80 works, some of which I later burned publicly in protest. I created several performance art pieces as a means of communicating directly with people in the streets.
Western practice, Eastern philosophy and the natural world all influence my work. Anyone who’s visited Nepal knows how the Himalayan mountains fill the horizon, capped with snow and sometimes covered by clouds. Observing them closely, I became aware of how clouds and their shadows alter the way the mountains appear, and I began to pay more attention to these shape-shifting forms. On arriving in England, I saw how English clouds, which I had only previously seen in works by Constable and Turner, were completely different.
I am drawn to clouds as a continually evolving metaphor for something familiar and ubiquitous, which quickly comes to seem unfathomable. I’m fascinated by that quality of something so ethereal it can simply melt away, yet if it draws energy from a warming ocean, can produce the power of tornadoes that destroy everything in their path. For me, clouds provide a vantage point to access other worlds, from the microcosmic realm of mists and vapours to the macrocosmic vistas of intergalactic dust clouds birthing stars in deep space.
How to represent the invisible is a question I explore in my work. For instance, Eastern philosophy says we cannot differentiate ourselves from the universe – all beings are one. I want to depict our spiritual connection to nature and the universe, breath, emotions, the energy and life force that surrounds and sustains us.
I moved to Margate in 2016, inspired to study the same sea and skyscapes as Turner, and now live here with my family. Recently, I have set up my new studio space that may certainly going ti change my practice. I am very excited tp have this new studio space to practice.
Govinda Sah