Master of Fine Art School of Fine Art
Sarah Palmer
Sarah Palmer is an artist based in Glasgow whose practice explores how landscape is represented, shared and consumed in the age of social media. She was recently selected for RBA Rising Stars (Royal Over-Seas League, London) and was a prize-winner at It’s Paradise Up North (Paradise Works, Manchester). In 2024 she was shortlisted for the BEEP Painting Prize (Elysium Gallery, Swansea). Within Glasgow, Sarah has exhibited at Strange Field, South Block Gallery, New Glasgow Society and the Glue Factory.
Sarah completed her MFA with the support of a scholarship from the Leverhulme Trust. She previously studied at Wimbledon College of Art, graduating in 2014, after which she was shortlisted for the Works in Print Art Graduates Prize, selected for the Clyde & Co Art Award Collection and longlisted for Saatchi New Sensations.
“Moving to Scotland challenged me to confront the fractured relationship I have with nature. I began to paint landscapes, but landscapes from the perspective of someone who spends a lot of time indoors, staring at their phone. My paintings play with the way we consume images in a world that is overflowing with them. At first, they seem like familiar landscapes you may have seen in photos while scrolling through Instagram, but they refuse to sit still. They flip back and forth between making perfect sense and reminding you that you’re looking at a painting, slowing you down as you try to make sense of them. This sensation is mirrored in the studio, where moments of slippage take place between documenting, remembering and imagining.“
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There you go
This past year, I’ve made paintings based on a road trip I took around the Highlands, thinking about how the kinds of photos we take for social media might feed into contemporary landscape painting, and the gap between being in a place and looking at its image. The title of this piece refers to the idea of travel as a way to “find yourself”. When I moved to Glasgow, the phrase “wherever you go, there you are” kept running through my mind, wondering if a new city would help me resolve my problems, or if I would just be the same person in a different place. The title’s use of “you” also ties into my research on the anti-selfie, positioning the viewer as the protagonist of the scene rather than a disembodied observer, as one often is in front of a Renaissance painting. This shift makes the image feel more universal, allowing it to enter the larger flow of images we encounter daily. Finally, phrases like “there you go” or “here you are” are often said when handing someone something they’ve asked for, which connects to the idea of Instagrammable images providing something easily liked and shared, rather than something truly original.
Here you are
Here you are started as a live research project exploring what happens when a photo is reinterpreted through painting over and over. Inspired by Hito Steyerl’s In defense of the poor image, the project examined whether repetition would cause the image to gain fluency or break down. Each new painting in the series of five was based on a photograph of the previous one. As the image shifted from one painting to the next, the castle’s position seemed to change, the waterline wavered like a tide, and the sky’s colour drifted from evoking time of day to something more abstract, as if the image had taken on a life of its own. My method became a loop, eyes jumping between the photo and the previous paintings, blurring the line between remembering, imagining, and looking; echoing the way social media reshapes our perception and recall.
