SARAH MUFFORD

YARRILA ARTS AND MUSEUM
February 8 - March 24 2024
Exhibition Essay

An excerpt response by Associate Professor in Art History and Visual Culture at Charles Sturt University, Sam Bowker

Sarah Mufford’s creative practice seeks to understand holistic processes of visual culture. Her work reveals subtle sensory structures that inform our perception of harmony and balance. Using a ruler, compass and vivid colours, she encourages us to see how geometry, colour, field and rhythmic forms interact as rich spaces for sensory imagination.

Across this delicate, colourful and ambitious exhibition, our vision is intricately interrupted by solid semicircles. Each is isolated from even more complex potential patterns. The visible under-drawing is intentional, for Mufford’s labor-intensive process emphasizes the importance of geometry as a profound foundation, both visually and conceptually. Her reverence for the historic pursuit of geometric forms in art history is drawn from her extensive fieldwork across India, southern Spain, Italy and Iran. Her experiments are related to the Pattern and Decoration (P&D) movement in American postmodernism, which drew on a similar array of sources across broadly Islamic, Persianate, and South Asian art – which were, and still are, collectively under-represented in Australian contemporary art – yet her finished work is distinctly of her own time and place.

Through this ongoing creative practice research, Mufford has studied diverse interpretations of geometric design and the history of sensory perception. Rather than simply copying specific examples or illustrating regional practices, she has compared their objectives and variations through their own contexts, and arrived at a coherence that is entirely her own. 

For generations of artists and artisans, mathematics has served as an extension of philosophy, religion and visual culture. Mufford is part of this continuity, drawing from the rich depth and breadth of art history to offer a new way of seeing. Her work is not descriptive, but imaginative, acknowledging sources as a testament to a more connected, coherent model of international creative practice. Sarah Mufford’s paintings are inventions rather than replications, posed on the continuous question ‘what if?’, and moving toward new possibilities.

Exhibited at Sydney Contemporary 2022, Carriageworks Sydney

Works from the show are available for purchase directly, enquiries sarahmufford@gmail.com

All works
29 x 26 cm
India ink, pigmented Ink, graphite, collaged found paper and polymer gesso on cotton rag paper
2021/22

The series Geo Collage was produced in 2021/2022 during the rolling pandemic lockdowns. As exhibitions and deadlines moved continuously or were cancellelled, my studio became that delightful place to retreat to and just simply work…. for no purpose other than just pleasure. No pressure, no deadlines.

The drawings are extensions of my current interest in exploring the balance between the repetition of hard edge geometry and spontaneous methods.

Exhibition: Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery (CHRG) 30th October 2021 - 15 January 2022.
Project: 2018 -2022

Joint Project coordinator and Participant Visual Artist.

White Bluff is a rocky headland located north of the regional city of Coffs Harbour, on the North Coast of NSW. It is surrounded by development on its landward edge and yet protected by the Solitary Islands Marine Reserve on its littoral and off-shore waters. It sits on the border of local indigenous territories. It is Crown Land - largely unknown and yet typical of a string of isolated coastal ecosystems along Australia's increasingly inhabited eastern seaboard. 

While White Bluff may have no recognised national significance, it is exactly this that makes it such a shared Australian experience. The aim of the White Bluff Project was to bring together a group of artists, scientists and Coffs Coast Community members to explore their shared experience of our costal spaces — exposing concerns about the transformative effects of climate and urbanization while celebrating the beauty, fragility and unique discoveries to be found in local landscapes.

In partnership with Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery, The White Bluff Project ran for nearly four years with a key aim being to demonstrate the value of art/science/community collaboration in developing new art forms and approaches to creative practice. The project culminated in an exhibition at the Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery (CHRG) from 30th October 2021 through to 15 January 2022. If you did not make it in person to the exhibition you can take a 3D virtual tour of the gallery with feature works highlighted and explained. This 3D tour is available for a limited time only.

For more information go to: https://www.thewhitebluffproject.co

Direct link to my involvement: https://www.thewhitebluffproject.co/news/2021/5/10/meet-the-team-sarah-mufford-visual-artist

Northern Rivers Contemporary
Art on Paper @Sydney Contemporary Sept 13-16 2018

Project Space, Byron School of Art, Mullumbimby NSW
Friday, February 15, 2019- Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Five Painters is a group exhibition with works by Imbi Davidson, Monique Lovering, Sarah Mufford, Brontë Naylor and Brooke Sanderson

Solo Exhibition at LS2, Liverpool Gallery Project Space, East Sydney NSW Australia  1 - 27 October 2016

AirSpace Projects Marrickville, Sydney.
5- 20 August 2016

Most work: 43 x 47 cm framed
Media: Mineral Pigment, gouache, India ink, graphite and polymer gesso on Arches

My practice has focused on organic patterning for two decades and more recently has juxtaposed intuitive processes of staining and mark making with geometry, using the grid and circle as a basic unit of pattern construction.

Earlier this year, I spent three months in Iran, Southern Spain and India exploring Islamic and pre-Islamic art and architecture concentrating on systems of geometric and biomorphic patterns developed in the regions. The "Repeat" series of works on paper reflect the significance and simplicity of the circle and its derivatives, as dominant element and motif.

Back in the studio, after coding a mass of travel drawings, I began reconstructing the different groups of patterns using graph paper, compass and ruler to grasp the logic and specific geometric rules. In the translation of these hard-edged geometries and tessellations, gesture, materiality and maintenance of a dynamic figure-ground relationship was emphasised. Surfaces exist as analytical and sensory, engaging with abstraction as a historical genre and unconsciously to the principles of Islamic design.

Kensington Contemporary, Chippendale NSW 19 Nov- 20 Dec 2015
First Avenue Gallery, Sawtell NSW 26 July- 28 August 2015

Sarah Mufford’s upcoming exhibition One Between Two constructs a fractured kaleidoscope where binaries collide: intuition and reasoning, free-flowing shapes and pattern systems, traditions of East and West. These notions tumble together in a series of watercolour paintings, where Mufford’s observations of nature evoke the style of Italian masters, and resonate an Indian mantra.

Inspired during a residency in Umbria, Italy, Mufford’s series was influenced by early Renaissance depictions of flora and foliage and the decorative patterns of Central and Northern Italian fresco painting. Mufford investigates nature by layering pattern systems to dissolve spatial relationships and colour perceptions, building vibrant textures from pools of colour and intricate prints.

At the core of her works lies the mantra “one between two”, a notion prominent in traditional Indian miniature painting. This mantra steers her application of pattern in the style of decorative marking, from leaves to fabric and brickwork. This textural weaving echoes the sacred geometrical ratio that Giotto used to determine the placement of stars on the ceiling of the Scrovegni chapel in Padua.

Lucia Nyugen
Kensington Contemporary

artestudioginestrelle , Umbria residency
Solo Exhibition at artestudioginestrelle Sept 2013
Galleria Le Logge, Assisi Umbria 30 Nov- 8 December 2013

The midsummer heat and seasonal transformation of particular flora and associated smells, textures, sounds, sights and tastes of Ginestrelle, located the core inquiry of my residency . The focus was on mark-making with water based media describing the light and space of the landscape juxtaposed with detail of local plants. It is part of an ongoing investigation of nature using direct observation, incorporating macro and micro dichotomy, dissolving interplay of fore, mid and back grounds and layering of inherent pattern and repetition. Ornament and subsequent flatenning of space as depicted in many of the regional Giotto, Pinturicchio and Perugino paintings was also used as a strategy to alter traditional conventions of space bridging formal geometry and organic allusion.

Sarah Mufford

Sept 2013

Australian Museum Research Project 2004-6

Exhibited at Esa Jake Gallery in 2006, Chippendale NSW

This body of work has been completed over the last 18 months and continues to focus on an intuitive approach to painting and the mark making process of drawing. Using pigmented inks, collage and acrylic paint to explore pattern and repetition in nature; I draw on rich sources of motifs and organic structures from the specimens at the Australian Museum, my personal collection as well as found images. Using a magnifying glass (which also dictated the format), to examine mostly marine invertebrates I amassed sketchbooks full of detailed research drawings in pen and ink.

Working back in the studio it was clear that the next works were not about faithful representation, but development of a personal language where subject matter is embedded and suspended in the viscosity of the paint. The works are structured in layers where I “arrive” at a resolved work. This emphasises the element of chance and importance of play in the production of drawings or paintings and has been a preoccupation of my art practice for the last ten years.

The title Cloisonné refers to a type of delicate jewel like enameling process originating in China and derived from the word “partition” which in French is cloisons. I see each of the series of three drawings as a description of one organism or specimen partitioned into its constituent parts, patterns and structures. The mounting is intended to highlight the object ness and emphasize both intimacy of production and viewing.

Sarah Mufford

August 2006

Exhibited both floors, Mary Place Gallery,
Paddington NSW Dec 2003

My new work continues to explore pattern and repetition of internal and external forms sourced from nature. I am more interested in an intuitive, process based approach that is now moving away from the politics of representation to be drawn to a hidden and alchemic order. The works are grounded in historical painting technique, employing layering to explore changing surface configurations and optical colour interaction, with motifs embedded and suspended in the viscosity of the paint.

Each work is developed by repeating a shape which is dictated by the use of a particular brush using the grid to establish a common framework. Forms are repeated working generally with hues from light to dark as I relish in the organic development of each painting and the myriad of choices in directional movement of the brush, pigment, saturation and dilution of the oil and ink. Honeycomb, coral nets float across the surface unifying and linking fields of syrupy seed. The sublime qualities of the media and the supports which I choose to work on are central to my exploration of natural phenomena. I intend to pursue these working methods to develop my personal language of material and form.

Sarah Mufford

July 2003