Sarah McWilliams completed her degree in Fine and Applied Arts at Ulster University in 2003, specialising in Lens Based Media. She subsequently trained to become a secondary school art teacher and currently works in the Downpatrick, Northern Ireland.
Photography has always been the bedrock of her creative practice but in recent years she has broadened her personal investigations exploring assemblage, collage and painting.
Layers of narrative build up in the work, whether implied through the juxtaposition of everyday objects or through weathered surface textures suggesting the passage of time, creating meaning through the stratification of history embedded in the aesthetics and symbolism of the work. Composition aims to create order out of the chaos found between heritage and everyday modern life.
“There is a great appreciation for storytelling in my family and just as every family album tells a constructed version of our past so too do the objects, surfaces and landscapes that surround us, they tell tales of culture, aspirations and heritage all becoming the ‘debris’ of our past as our social values begin to shift. My work attempts to hold on to a fragment of these elements as they begin to decay and are lost to memory.”
