Down High teacher in focus with new arts exhibition

Down High teacher in focus with new arts exhibition

17 April 2024

A DOWN High School teacher recently launched her own exhibition at the Down Arts Centre in Downpatrick.

Specialising in lens based media, art teacher Sarah McWilliams completed her degree in Fine and Applied Arts at Ulster University in 2003.

Photography has always been the bedrock of her creative practice, but in recent years she has broadened her personal investigations, exploring assemblage, collage and painting.

Describing her work, Sarah said the place of the artist in society is peripheral.

“We exist within the liminal spaces – crosses between the boundaries are part observed of the border and imagined. Liminality, they are represented in this work as quotidian objects, such as doors, stone gateway walls and through abstract layers of intersecting line and shape,” she explained.

“This work is about what it means to belong at these thresholds, but to belong in the spaces between and to exist in a permanent state of transition.”

Sarah added: “My practice is about reconciling our belonging and what I means in a changing space with our desire to belong to an ever.” 

Sarah was joined at the exhibition launch by her aunt Yvonne Boyle who is an Causeway Coast and Glens Alderman.

She collaborated with Sarah on one of her paintings entitled ‘Stone’,which incorporated written words from Ms Boyle’s poem of the same name.

An excerpt beside the painting read  —“This glows in moonlight my niece says.

“We stand at the lichen covered granite with its veins of quartz, the wall on either side, silurian greywarke.”