A Paper Tundra | New Collage by Sara Breinlinger

We are delighted to present new work by London-based painter and collage-maker, Sara Breinlinger. Moving away from her more representational practice, Sara explores the world of abstraction through the means of collage.

Sara studied fine art at Middlesex Polytechnic but then went on to pursue a career as a psychotherapist. For the past twenty years, she has been sharing her time as both a psychotherapist and as a practicing artist, and so it’s no surprise that her artwork draws on the human condition. However, instead of contextualizing the mind and behaviour of another, Sara enters her own personal and cognitive journey in this new series of work. Layering scraps of paper that she’s painted on, drawn on, even culled from her partner’s old technical drawings (he is a construction manager for film and TV if you’re wondering), Sara forms a tundra of colour and texture that distils and reconfigures the world she lives in. Describing her practice, she says, “In all my work, displaced forms, fragments, memories and colours are pieced together and built on one another to create new connections and meanings. I think of it as a disorderly attempt to make sense of things and I’m usually aiming in the finished pieces, for a way of creating some order that can contain life’s disorder.  So it’s both the creation of order in the chaos, but where a tension remains, where something in the piece still calls for resolution - a disequilibrium which speaks to the complexity, strangeness and messiness of life.”

Growing up, Sara and her family moved around a lot, travelling across Europe, the Middle East and Asia. These were exciting but also disconcerting times for Sara, and so she turned to art as a way to make sense of the world around her. Years down the line, she is still making art that explores the realms of perception. Cut-out, drawn-on, painted-on, and fashioned from the readymade, Sara’s colourful building blocks probe different experiences, memories, and feelings. There’s no doubt that her whimsical and itinerant life growing up is enmeshed in these compositions, but the strength of Sara’s work lies in her ability to evoke that immanence, a quality of being that is just as much about the past as it is about the now and forever.

You can view Sara Breinlinger’s collection of collage by clicking HERE.