Image courtesy of the artist.

SARAH THORNTON-SMITH

Interested in how colour behaves through processes and encounters, and how printed surfaces might hold traces of experience, Thornton-Smith explores shifting pigments, natural materials, chance, and gradual discovery through unfolding experimentation.

Thornton-Smith’s practice follows colour as it shifts through making, material interaction, and perception-  where subtle changes in material, surface and form alter how colour is seen and understood. Works emerge intuitively, guided less by plan than by attention - by what the material begins to do.

“I am interested in moments where colour behaves unpredictably - where gradients soften, edges blur, and layered impressions begin to suggest movement. These are not singular images but changing conditions, dependent on light, position, and looking.

Shifting Fields becomes a way of naming this ongoing interest. In the residency, monoprint processes appear as one strand among others, alongside experiments with natural and found materials. Rather than separating these approaches, I am interested in how they might overlap, interrupt, and quietly alter one another.

The work is less about arriving at outcomes than remaining within a state of making - where repetition, chance, and material response generate small deviations and unexpected turns. Each gesture leaves behind something that may shift again, depending on how it is encountered.

What emerges is not fixed but held briefly - something in the act of becoming, rather than completion.”

Sarah Thornton-Smith

ARTIST BIO

Born in Singapore of Malay-Chinese heritage, Sarah Thornton-Smith is a Boorloo/Perth-based artist whose practice explores colour, pattern, and form through perceptual and material processes. She works with hand-manipulated paper and layered colour to create sculptural works that respond to light, movement, and shifting viewpoints.

Moving to Western Australia in her early teens, she developed a sensitivity to light and landscape that continues to inform an intuitive, observational approach to making. Through folding, layering, and gradation, she explores colour as a sensory language shaped by memory, atmosphere, and attention. Her work draws on patterns found in nature and lived experiences of place and belonging, unfolding through slow, responsive engagement.

Her work has been exhibited in Australia and internationally and is held in many public and private collections.