Sarah Needham Artist

For my first collection at The Other Art Fair Bristol “The Bristol Presentiments 1770” series, I have chosen to use only the pigments imported into Bristol from January-June 1770.

I use historically resonant pigments in abstract works to create absorbing spaces. Spaces to fall into to get a little lost in and to remember.

By using these materials from a formative period in Bristol’s past I am creating quiet conversations with the viewers current lived experience and this period in Bristol and the surrounding area. The pieces invite you to fall into the spaces created in the work, making connections and getting a little lost in your own memories. These works are of this place, and of course are of the globe. This series weaves between lost pasts that have been elided and makes space for the untold stories of Bristol.

My background is in Art and Development Studies and I have a long term interest in the impact of trade on people and place.  There is a sense that “modern” Bristol began in the late 1760s and the early 1770s with the changing of the law allowing ships owned by Society of Merchant Venturers to participate in the transatlantic trade, the slave trade triangle.  Looking through the Bristol Presentiment papers of 1770, I chose the first six months that they were published, and made her images using only pigments which were imported during that time, they include indigo, ochres, vermillion, madder and lead white. The oil painting media that were also imported include linseed, linseed oil, turpentine, resin, beeswax, wood, linen and cotton.

In terms of the developments in painting and mark making, Bristol was one of the first cities outside London to have its own colour-men, specialist paint and pigment suppliers, three are  listed in the 1775 street directory, along with three limners (expert paint makers and painters of miniatures) and seven painters, one china painter, twelve potters, nine dyers and a wide range of other craft trades related to these imports.

These abstract images are full of resonance.  Through the physical act of making these paints this body of work sits within a paradigm that is anchored within the geographical and historical context of Bristol.