Time and space are, in fact, dimensionless awareness refracted through the prism of the finite mind, that is, refracted through thought and perception.

-Rupert Spira, The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter

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Time lines. Sarah Wren Wilson maps timelines. Gridded environments of blue, green, peach, yellow, orange, cream; the summer evening versions of these colours. A windless softness that exudes something easy to accept. Easy being a misleading word. For these paintings take time to make. And to absorb.

 

Methodical balances. As an abstract painter, I read abstract paintings when I first see them, deciphering how they are made, to form a timeline of the activity. It thrills me to see the brave moves another painter dares to make. The trouble they get themselves into and how they get out of it. Here we see the clean, transparent wide ribbon or the rays of brushstrokes that are the very first mark. I imagine the canvas without, and moments later with, each mark. Nothing else but them. Wilson’s marks are visible. Everything counts. There is no correction. And once a mark is made, it dictates what comes next. Choices narrow quickly on such a spare ground. The puzzle begins. The “problem” is solved in as graceful a field as the space before the mark. The methodical balance evident in this work tears at my heart. Its sureness, precision, and hand are delicate. Attention must be paid.

 

Caught. A net of a grid. Present and unobtrusive, as in it isn’t the first thing we see. Not overpowering anything. At times it is made of little heartbeat lines, busy lines. At times it is the dots on the corners that show us it is there. A transparency holding everything else in place, weaving the spaces into foreground and background.

 

Contradiction. The spare ground is not so spare once one spends time. Simplicity of form belies the complexities of Wilson’s spaces. The framing colour encloses these worlds. Highway to Heaven appears un-contained with no immediate edge colour. The border has slipped around the corner away from the front to give it an energetic speed the others don’t have, diagonal swiftness, jagged net marks. Happy to be. The deep V of Overtly Held does just that. It is possible that After, The Ground Between, and Time Awaiting, with their gradient entries, windows something of a memory. The just past, the whiff of a could-have-been or possible future.

 

Softly angled planes. In any case, it is clear that care of the psyche is taken. A suffusion of air, the warmth of symmetry, the slow unfurling of anything tight under a pink spectrum of light–all are painter language for concise engagement with one’s being. The darker shadows signal that quiet time of being well-considered. The angles meander to enclose unheavy spaces. The open negatives leaning this way and that form a basis for the necessity of space as an expression of care. 

 

Grace. Wilsons’s Westport studio was full with these paintings the day I visited to see them in person. Two bundles of bamboo from her garden, one wrapped in blue and yellow fuzzy yarn and one yet to be wrapped. Sarah herself in mint green and rusty red, a peach coloured cup with green handle upturned on the table. The large windows open in the high-ceilinged room. The green estuary river sitting still across the road. A feeling of alignment pervaded. It felt like all was considered and not just consciously. Underworlds show themselves in our environments. Wilson is okay with that. She approaches this work with an air of curiosity. Incremental shifts from the last work, in form, colour and feeling; guided by whatever it is that knows how to gather information from around and about and within to output it in Sarah-shaped language, unselfconscious confidence.

 

Blue. And how have I not written about the blue, yet? To have come this far and only mentioned it once. Blue is the intensity and the courage of the work. Blue is the pillar and the horizon. Blue is the support for the pink and green spaces . Blue is the net upon which we stand. RAL 5003 Sapphire Blue shows us all the other colours. What once was bare, is now brushed, lined and coloured to sing out and proclaim space. The independent expression of awareness refracted through the prism of the mind.

 

Nuala Clarke, August 2025