I’m a painter in the process of setting up a new studio after completing my MFA. My practice explores how landscape is represented, shared and consumed in the age of social media.
As I no longer have access to a workshop, a key part of what I’d use the bursary for is equipment to make my own wooden panels, including a rail saw, a mitre saw, clamps and a large worktable. For my degree show, I exhibited a large work made of three vertically stacked panels. Splitting the image created a kind of structural friction. Having my own woodwork setup would allow me to push this further: experimenting with paintings made up of panels of different depths or materials, letting the image shift across surfaces that don’t quite match. That physical interruption mirrors the way I paint, with areas handled differently, parts falling slightly out of sync. I’m also thinking about pixels, grids and the way images behave online: fractured, loaded in bits, swiped past. This approach goes beyond a superficial nod to digital aesthetics to investigate how fragmentation and instability reveal deeper complexities in perception and memory.
I’d also use the bursary to cover travel and accommodation for a research trip to the England–Scotland borderlands, where I’ll gather reference material to develop a new body of work. As an English person living in Scotland, I’m drawn to the tension in that in-between place. I’m interested in travel as a kind of personal mythmaking and the hope that a new place might offer clarity, escape, or resolution. I want to spend time in places that don’t resolve easily into one identity or another, where something sits just outside recognition or meaning keeps shifting. It’s an opportunity to immerse myself in a landscape that mirrors what I’m trying to get at in the work.
The bursary would give me the tools, space and time to move beyond the limits of student resources and scale up physically and conceptually, pushing ideas I’ve begun about how paintings can hold contradiction, shift across formats and reflect a fractured sense of place.
Darlington played a key role in the early development of the railways, acting as a link for travel and trade in northern England. This history reflects themes of transition, connection and in-between spaces; ideas central to my practice exploring landscapes as fluid, complex and open to interpretation.
My research and paintings of the England–Scotland borderlands resonate with Darlington’s legacy as a place where boundaries are crossed and identities overlap. Exhibiting this work locally could foster meaningful dialogue about cultural tension and landscape representation.
Alongside the exhibition, I propose running a community workshop inviting participants to bring photographs, found images or stories about their own “in-between” places and experiences. This would create space for local voices, connecting personal memory with questions of how landscapes are understood.
I’m interested in reaching out to local groups such as Darlington Mind’s Arts and Crafts Group, who support wellbeing through creativity. A collaboration could offer an inclusive setting for exploring relationships to place and identity through image-making and storytelling.
Through these activities, my work could contribute to Darlington’s creative scene and raise its profile by encouraging engagement with ideas about place, identity and layered histories, inviting local voices and stories to shape the conversation.
This past year, I’ve made paintings based on a road trip I took around the Scottish 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. 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. I’m interested in what happens when a painting stops being a copy and becomes something else. I spend a lot of time with the surface, sanding down, repainting, trying to resolve the image until it holds together. Varying paint treatments make parts of the painting feel like they exist in different dimensions. These aren’t observational landscapes in the traditional sense, they’re filtered through other images, phone screens, moments I didn’t fully take in at the time. They’re not just about the image, but what gets lost, changed or discovered in the act of turning a place into a picture. I was recently selected for “RBA Rising Stars” (Royal Over-Seas League, London) and won a prize at “It’s Paradise Up North” (Paradise Works, Manchester). In 2024 I was shortlisted for “the BEEP Painting Prize” (Elysium Gallery, Swansea). Within Glasgow, I’ve exhibited at Strange Field, South Block Gallery, New Glasgow Society and the Glue Factory.
BA (hons) Fine Art: Painting – Wimbledon College of Art – 2014
Master of Fine Art – Glasgow School of Art – 2025
2023 – Recipient of the Leverhulme Master of Fine Art Bursary (full fees and stipend), awarded on the basis of academic excellence, creative portfolio and personal statement
2014 – painting purchased by UAL collection https://collections.arts.ac.uk/objects/35504/game-show?ctx=f0a2f09a-52fe-4f70-9c59-98b1a3706736&idx=3
Not at time of writing but I’ve been selected as one of five artists on my programme who will be interviewed by press next week as part of the promotion for our MFA degree show
Email: sarahpalmerpainting@gmail.com
Address: 3/2 26 Aberdour Street, Glasgow, G31 3NH, GB
Local Authority: Glasgow City Council
