Sarah Stone (UK, 1994) is a visual artist based in Belgium. She is currently doing her Master degree in photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. She is represented by, and the assistant for, Stieglitz19 gallery.
Her work covers a variety of genres in photography, but he highest focus point is on portraiture. Since being introduced to the work of August Sander and his quest for the ‘perpetual gaze’, Sarah has undertaken a role of likewise searching for character to portray, wherever it be strangers or loved ones.
Since the pandemic, she shifted her focus to architectural photography, depicting the monumental industrial strip in Antwerp. This became her bachelor project named ‘The End of the Pipeline’, and within this project she dived into the world of crude oil, saturating her prints in engine oil and UV printing onto aluminium sheets. The tactility of the photograph became prominent in the search for extracting the engineered conponments of the industrial infrastructure.
In 2020 she was picked up by Stieglitz19 gallery for her collages that she made for an assignment during the pandemic. These were developed and shown in a pop-up exhibition in October 2020 and in a group show with Vincent Delbrouck and Miriam Tölke in June 2021 (Collage! Collage! Collage!), both at Stieglitz19 gallery. Sarah deconstructed and reconstructed eccentric interiors and detailed facades of old photographs of castles and cathedrals. She adorned these with her taste for bold colours, represented either with paper or by painting.
Sarah is currently working on her master project that will finalise in June 2022 as well as a self-published book, using her own archive of images she has taken over the past seven years of her closest friend and strongest muse, Camille-Anais (La vie de Camille).
About What I Left Behind (PART 1) – words by Sarah Stone:
A decade is approaching since I departed the (un)United Kingdom, and in those ten years, I have scarcely reconciled with it. What I left behind, was a disbursed and dysfunctional family, sheltered in a picturesque landscape. However, years went by, and I found myself dwelling in a field of romanticism. When I returned briefly in the summer of 2020, I rolled out a series of photographs within a flash, struck by all that bathed in the almighty sunshine or under the flashing moonlight. I was a tourist in my own home. Through the act of photographing, I began to re-connect, not only with the nature, the language, and the architecture; but most importantly, with my parents (my mother became my English muse). The romantic thoughts I had about England unusually lived up to the imagination.
(The submitted photographs are the springboard for the project that is currently in motion, to be wrapped up in May 2022.)
