Sarah Plamondon

What happens when we take the time to look at things a little more closely?

As a visual artist living on Vancouver Island, BC, Sarah Plamondon continually asks that question in order to create works that vary from mixed media paintings to functional and decorative ceramic art.

Originally from Calgary, Alberta, Sarah divided her childhood time between exploring the parks and fields around her home and making art. She has always been fascinated with the intersection between human-made and natural structures and her post-secondary education followed those interests as she studied fine art, interior design and finally arrived at a degree in Environmental Design from the University of Manitoba.

After moving to Vancouver Island in 2011, Sarah began to revisit her art practice as a counterpoint to the analytical and highly structured aspects of her design career. She uses art as an opportunity to slow down, closely examine, and truly appreciate the amazing variety of plant life present in both the natural and human-made environments on Vancouver Island and beyond.

The forms, textures, colours and cycles found in nature are a consistent source of inspiration for Sarah and can be found woven through all the work she creates. The materials she chooses to work with are carefully considered in order to evoke the ever-present undercurrent of human-made versus natural. The juxtaposition of the sinuous and solid. Brush strokes in paint and scratches in clay are deliberately left as an acknowledgement of the materials and the maker. Flowing inks meet hand-drawn marks and mounds of clay become vessels to house the very plants that started as an inspiration. Sarah continues to explore the symbiotic, and more often parasitic, relationships between humans and nature and expresses those connections through her work.

Sarah’s current series is centered around examination of some of the smaller organisms that make up our biological communities. Dreamscapes is a collection of imagined landscapes featuring plant-like forms inspired by fungi, moss and lichens. Each painting is created using a combination of watercolour, acrylic paint, ink and pen on coldpress watercolour paper. Meant to mimic the scale of the organisms, the paintings are themselves quite small with the largest measuring only 8” x 10”. Sarah uses the shapes, textures and colours developed for the paintings as inspiration for the ceramic vessels included in the series