Lyra artist Sarah Dwyer is serious about the body. Her dynamic, large-scale abstract works depict amorphous forms that recall limbs, hands, and feet in vibrant color. The artist’s interest in the corporeal extends to her technique, which involves a dramatic dance with the canvas, ending with a daringly full-bodied application of paint that indexes the artist’s own physicality. Dwyer’s work has been exhibited internationally, from Saatchi Gallery in London to Wooster Projects in New York City. In October, she will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Bridgette Mulholland in Paris. Read on for our interview with Sarah Dwyer, whose work is currently on view in Lyra exhibition “I’m Not Afraid of Ghosts.”
I do have a very physical way of working, I’m fast and decisive and feel myself wrestling with forms and ground to find that balance or tension. I jab and dive with the surfaces, similar to a boxer dancing in front of the opponent, an assertion of presence but also a transfer of energy and intension.
Lyra: It’s our understanding that your work attempts to hybridize our day-to-day as well as a desire for play, can you speak more to how your dynamic forms reflect both qualities simultaneously?
Sarah Dwyer:I am interested in where the familiar meets the extraordinary. I see humour in that tension— the smirk of the ridiculous just below the surface of banality. I allow surprise appendages and other suggestive forms to appear in my work, often mischievously camouflaged. For me, painting is where the physical meets the illusionary- it’s a space for play and crossover, where the knowing and the unknowing live side by side. There’s room for a spot of subversion.
I’m Not Afraid Of Ghosts
Photographer: Bella Howard
Installation view “I’m Not Afraid Of Ghosts” (17 April – 22 September 2024) at Palazzo Tiepolo Passi
Lyra: Tell us more about your interest in process and how it is readable in your artwork; how do you understand your work as an archive of your process of creation?
Sarah Dwyer:I work with what has gone before, emphasising or eliminating earlier marks as I go to open up fresh meaning through a process of removal and insertion. The work becomes a kind of palimpsest. I like the suggestion of excavation that the layering of interactions conveys. The pieces record their own histories and there is a deepening of meaning
Le Vernissage. Partie Un
Photographer: Sean Fader
Installation view “Le Vernissage. Partie Un” at Brigitte Mulholland courtesy Brigitte Mulholland
Lyra: How do you incorporate elements of your Irish identity into your work?
Sarah Dwyer: Seamus Heaney wrote a poem called ‘Bogland’, describing the Irish landscape of Heaney’s childhood, which begins by comparing its ‘swampy’ expanse to the open prairies of the American Southwest. He later described this kind of bogland as ‘...a landscape that remembered everything that had happened in and to it.’
The act of painting is a cathartic one for me. The works, sometimes, are very fast-paced in the making, and suggestive of personal and shared histories, drawing on Irish myth, religion and psychoanalysis, in order to grasp the real within the imaginary. A lyrical transference of identity.
In my quest to unearth anthropomorphic forms in landscape, the surface undergoes a process similar to that of digging; colours and forms are dragged to the surface, as if the paint itself were the turf and peat of Heaney’s poems. I am trying to harness the kinetic energy expended in their making, retaining a visual tension whereby the pictorial narrative is in constant flux.
Portrait of Sarah Dwyer
Photographer: Alex Sargenson
Portrait of Sarah Dwyer in her studio courtesy of the artist.
Lyra: In an interview you described painting as a “full-body experience,” can you tell us what you mean by that?
Sarah Dwyer: I do have a very physical way of working, I’m fast and decisive and feel myself wrestling with forms and ground to find that balance or tension. I jab and jibe at my surfaces, similar to a boxer dancing in front of the opponent, an assertion of presence but also a transfer of energy and intension.
When I am finishing a painting, I leave the last 1% to be a particularly ‘full-body’ moment — a big gesture that often involves the whole of my arm span and risks the success of the painting. The crescendo involves jeopardy and hyper-focus.
I also understand painting to be an extension of my own body, so not only is the act of painting a performative dance of sorts, but the work reflects back truths about the experience of having a body, what it is to embody a form that mutates and grows as we live our lives.
In the Light of Time
Image Courtesy of Galerie Brigitte Mulholland
Oil on Linen 75 x 100 cms
Lyra: What are you currently exploring in your studio?
Sarah Dwyer:In addition to creating a new body of work for upcoming commercial shows, I am creating works for a touring institutional museum show in Ireland and the UK for 2025/26. I am working to produce a body of sculptures, paintings, prints and drawings that will all share the lexicon of mark-making and understanding of colour that I have been developing throughout the course of my career. An ambitious body of work that will underline the dialogue within my expanded painting practice.
Off Kilter Solo Exhibition
Lyra: Anything that you are watching, reading, or seeing right now that you find inspiring?
Sarah Dwyer:I have always taken a lot of inspiration from Guston so I’m excited to be reading ‘Guston Now’ from the recent Tate Retrospective. Recently I visited the Ferdinand Hodler show at the Kunsthaus, Zurich and THE LATENESS OF THE HOUR at the Foundation Beyeler, Basel. I am particularly interested in the experimental presentation of works including the playful juxtaposition of the Marlene Dumas with Ferdinand Hodler.
Velvet Elvis
Courtesy of the Sarah Dwyer
H30 x D26 x W43 cm, Glaze and Engobe, Earthenware
Lyra: How do you feel about being exhibited alongside the other artists in “I’m Not Afraid of Ghosts?”
I recognise that the universal themes exploring parallels between cyclical histories and the female body run through the show. Of course, I am completely delighted to be in the legendary company of artists such as Sarah Lucas & Tracey Emin, who I have long admired; whilst also exhibiting with other emerging contemporary artists.
Sarah Dwyer: What can you share with us about your October solo show at Brigitte Mulholland?
I am particularly excited by this show because it constitutes a kind of emotional re-entry into Paris for me. I lived there for 5 formative years 22 years ago and I feel a deep and poignant connection to the city. I’ll be showing an intimate series of semi-abstract, semi-figurative paintings with a strong Nabis influence. Mon mot d’amour pour la ville!
Interviewer: Maddie Phinney
Charmer’s Lap
Courtesy of Fabian Lang Gallery
Oil and Pastel on Linen, 130 x 100cm