si sapsford
Paintings
Painting provides another way of exploring the concerns that run throughout my practice. Figures, interiors and landscapes occupy moments of transition, where familiar narratives become uncertain and psychological space takes precedence over description. Water, thresholds and shifting perspectives recur throughout the work, acting as metaphors for memory, vulnerability and transformation.
Many of the paintings draw on art history, not as quotation but as conversation. References to artists including Caravaggio, and Sargent are reinterpreted through contemporary experience, creating works that move between the personal and the collective, the domestic and the political.
Still Life explores the uneasy coexistence of everyday life and environmental or political crisis. Sapsford’s paintings examine the tension between ordinary domestic activity and wider global instability. While we may be drinking coffee or playing cards, elsewhere rivers overflow their banks, storms intensify, wars rage, and people are displaced through conflict and environmental collapse. Drawing on imagery of flooded landscapes and violent weather systems, her landscapes move towards abstraction, reflecting instability and disorientation. In contrast, her portraits appear self-contained and absorbed in private experience, seemingly unaware of the forces unfolding around them. The work asks how we live with catastrophe at a distance, and how easily crisis can coexist with routine, comfort, and apparent normality.
Ophelia
Across the series, water becomes both a physical and psychological space: a place of loss, transformation and movement, where the boundary between being carried and being overwhelmed remains deliberately ambiguous.
Portraits
These portraits draw on the long tradition of portraiture in art history, while looking for ways to bring the language of the painted portrait into the present. Working from photographs and observation, I am interested not simply in creating a likeness, but in the character, presence and sense of the individual that a portrait can hold. References to art history painting run through the work, from the formal conventions of portraiture to the ways artists have used pose, composition, gesture and setting to suggest something beyond appearance. These references are not intended as direct recreations, but as a starting point for thinking about how we look at people and how they are represented. Some of these works are commissioned portraits, allowing the relationship between artist and sitter to become part of the process. The commission provides a particular set of circumstances, but the aim remains the same: to make a portrait that feels more than simply a record of what someone looks like.
Doubting Thomas
Doubting Thomas takes its starting point from the biblical moment in which doubt is resolved through touch: Thomas needs to place his hand into Christ’s wound before he can believe. Here, the familiar image is quietly subverted. The wound becomes vertical, suggesting a vaginal opening, and the act of probing shifts the narrative from religious certainty towards a more ambiguous encounter with the body. What was once evidence of resurrection becomes a site of questioning, intimacy and self-knowledge. The work occupies the space between faith and doubt, the sacred and the bodily. Rather than asking whether something can be believed, it asks what it means to investigate — and whether knowledge can ever be separated from the body through which we experience it. The image exists as both drawing and painting, with a sculptural work extending the same territory into physical space.
Last Orders
Last Orders / Supper at Emmaus exists in several versions across painting and drawing. The work takes the familiar image of the meal at Emmaus as a starting point, but shifts the emphasis from the biblical narrative towards the tensions held within the gathering: recognition and absence, intimacy and unease, presence and loss. Repeatedly returning to the same scene allows the image to change, with each version becoming another way of looking at the moment.
Still Life
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Faisal Series
These portraits of Faisal Abdu'Allah explore portraiture as a means of looking beyond physical likeness towards states of inner experience. Following his conversion from Christianity to Islam, Faisal is depicted with his eyes closed, turning his attention away from the viewer and towards an internal, contemplative space. The closed eyes become significant: rather than offering the reciprocal gaze expected of a portrait, they withhold it. The works suggest a moment of introspection and spiritual transformation, where identity is not something simply seen from the outside but something experienced from within. Portraiture becomes less about recognition than about what remains unseen — belief, reflection and the possibility of transformation.
Life Boat Men Series
The Lifeboat Crew series began with After the Shout, followed by Breeches Buoy Rescue, Iceland, as part of an award from the National Portrait Gallery. The resulting exhibition travelled from the National Portrait Gallery to Sheffield, where the series developed further with the addition of Light Recognition at Sea, the film Rock and Sunlight on Water. Together, the works explore the lifeboat crew not simply as heroic figures, but through moments of movement, waiting, recognition and the shifting relationship between people, sea and landscape.
