The Artsy Vanguard 2023–2024: Sarah Cunningham

Cunningham was speaking to me at Lisson Gallery in London, where she’d just opened her first solo show in the U.K. (the gallery announced representation of Cunningham seven days before the unveiling). The title of the exhibition, “The Crystal Forest,” was taken from a paper by Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveoris de Castro: a study of Indigenous narratives of spirits in the Amazon rainforest. In these accounts, Cunningham explained, the forest was associated with a luminous and multifaceted crystal, made up of innumerable spirits or “images.” When she read the paper in 2020, Cunningham realized she wanted to approach her painting the same way: a process she calls “thinking with the forest.” Even if it all sounds slightly esoteric, you understand what she means when you stand in front of her prismatic, pulsing paintings.

Forests have played an important role at multiple points in Cunningham’s life. She grew up in Nottingham, a city in the English Midlands that famously borders on the woodlands where Robin Hood is said to have roamed. She always knew she wanted to be an artist, so she embarked on an undergraduate degree in fine art at Loughborough University—against the practically minded advice of her mother. (“That’s the working-class mentality to these things,” Cunningham told me.)

She started making collages that critiqued the taxonomic systems introduced in the 18th century to classify biological organisms. “The way you ontologically separate these things—animal, human, tree—I’ve always found that way of thinking problematic.”

After graduating in 2015, Cunningham found work in galleries and driving vans around the country. One day, a friend, a plein-air painter, gave her a palette and a set of oil paints. “The fluidity and autonomy of the pigment, the way it could stretch and dissolve—I never looked back,” she said. From then on, whenever she wasn’t driving vans, she was in the studio, often painting through the night and getting ill from overwork.

In 2018 she was selected for a research residency in Panama, where she stayed with an Indigenous community in an area dense with tropical rainforest. That experience, once again among the trees, spurred her on to apply for a master’s in painting at London’s Royal College of Art. She received a full scholarship for the highly competitive course.

Before the master’s was finished, Cunningham scored her first gallery show, at Almine Rech in New York in 2022. But the recent surge in commercial attention, and attendant pressure on her productivity, doesn’t faze her. “I’m not someone who makes a work and immediately puts it out in the world. I need to have my own time with the work,” she said. She has multiple paintings on the go in her studio simultaneously, sometimes for several years. The goal is to let go of preconceived ideas about her subjects, to foster a kind of intuitive openness within the painting process. There are no preparatory sketches, no plans. “The less I look at a painting the better. I’ve got a naughty corner in my studio where I put paintings and forget that they exist. Then I come back and they have grown, percolated in my mind.”

Sometimes, Cunningham cuts up paintings to create new ones. With I Will Look Into the Earth (all works 2023), she divided the canvas in half and inserted another panel in the middle to form an expansive triptych. She regularly flips stretched canvases around, so she can re-enter the landscapes from a different perspective.

In Crystal Forest, a stream of flowing water is frozen, upturned, at the top of the canvas. She also experiments with methods of applying paint. She snaps branches off trees and attaches them to brushes. Recently she’s been placing works on the floor and throwing on large quantities of paint, which she then pushes around with a rag or palette knife. Over time the surfaces of her paintings have become increasingly layered, like the foliage of a forest canopy. After a studio session, her arms ache with tiredness, she said.

Only after finishing a painting does Cunningham understand what she has conjured. “There are childhood memories that I’d forgotten about, or dreams, or other artworks that I’ve been looking at,” she said. In Soul Capsule, for instance, she can now see the influence of Pierre Bonnard’s paintings of his wife Marie in the bath. “None of these things are in my mind as I’m painting, but they tell me what they’re about—like a mirror,” she explained. Only in the final stage is she ready to give the work a title: one that describes what the painting means to her without closing down possible meanings for the viewer.

Such an organic, evolving process suggests that more changes in how Cunningham works are inevitable. Indeed, she is currently writing poetry and experimenting with sculpture—although that’s “just for myself for now,” she said. She is also trying to unlearn her long-term habit of painting nocturnally, a holdover from her van-driving days. Instead, she has been arriving at her studio in the early morning, when she can witness the sun rising and hear the dawn chorus. The shift from artificial to natural light is reflected in the palette of her latest canvases. For Cunningham, this is an exciting prospect. As she put it, “I very much want to take painting somewhere else.”