Biography
Paint underpins everything; its colour, viscosity, and capacity to hold and release time. Aluminium cooking foil, cheap, domestic, and democratic, is both substrate and collaborator. Glue begins as a modest yet vital agent, laminating strata into a surface to paint on; over time, as works are handled, folded, stored, and reconfigured, bonded assembly gives way to contact-forged cohesion.
Central to the work is temporal autonomy: maintaining a self-determined rhythm within a culture structured by acceleration and distraction. The practice is built from piecemeal pockets of time, with life rather than separate from it.
Abstraction functions as a perceptual opening, withholding fixed narrative to create space for imagination and feeling. When installed, the works resist total visibility, encouraging movement, shifting perspectives, and discoveries beyond the artist's own intentions.
Sarah Ryder* (b. 1978, Wales) lives and works in Colwyn Bay, North Wales. MFA Painting, Slade School of Fine Art, London, 2008; BA in Fine Art Painting at the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside, 2000. She is a Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors.
Recent solo exhibitions: MULTIFERALS, Exeter Phoenix Gallery, Devon, 2025; Imperceivable (until it isn’t). Isotop Fellesatelier, Bergen, 2024; Feet. Brain. Back Again. Galeri, Caernarfon, with second iteration in Cass Art Gallery, Manchester, both 2022. Recent group exhibitions: FLAT VOLUME, APT Gallery, London, 2025; All Kinds of Hands, The Storey, Lancaster, 2025; Caught In The Act, Royal Society of Sculptors, London, 2024; PLAY: The Movie!, Ty Pawb, Wrexham, 2023; BLINK Room Share 4, Safehouse 1, London, 2023; Maquette, No Show Space, London, 2023; Exeter Contemporary Open, Exeter Phoenix Gallery, Devon, 2022; Yellow Archangel Perceiving Anomalies, General Practice, Lincoln, 2021.
Recipient of the overall award for Exeter Contemporary Open 2022.
*Exhibited as Sarah Bowker-Jones until 2020