Biography
Since 2019, Sarah Ryder has worked with aluminium cooking foil, acrylic paint, and glue to develop Temporal Feral Forms – portable abstract works that change with each handling, exhibition, and storage. Oscillating between painting and sculpture, the forms accumulate creases, folds, tears, and holes as haptic records of encounter. Working from self-imposed material limits, Ryder builds a practice attuned to time, labour, and entropy. Rooted in embodied making and shaped by working-class experience, her work treats instability as generative and material collaboration as foundational.
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