Sarah Needham is a British artist whose work has been exhibited internationally in commercial and public galleries across the UK, USA, and Europe. She has an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art (2024–25), where her installation Forgotten Dreams was featured in the 2025 exhibition Ancestral Utopias. Her current practice explores themes of grief and liveness through investigations into cave painting and the symbolism of crows. @sarahneedham1965
In what ways did your experiences in England inform your artistic vision? I was born in Lincolnshire, but raised in the West Country, I had a very rural childhood. We played in the outdoors as children, taking clay from banks of rivers, riding our bike to the New Forest and as children we were deeply in contact with nature and ancient history that was present in our surroundings.
Can you recall a defining moment when you recognized art as your chosen path, and what made that moment feel significant or transformative for you? I was always in love with drawing and painting, my Mum had a big dark wooden box where she kept materials for us for rainy days when we couldn't go outside. A seminal moment was visiting the Tate on a school trip to London and seeing the Seagram Murals, it was not long after I had first experienced death and I felt like the work held me. The importance of the arts is both a refuge, for difficult emotions and a space to explore possibilities. It's a medium for connection across place and time.
What does your typical day in the studio look like? Walk us through your studio and your most used materials and tools. I start by walking, at the moment I am at the Royal College of Art so I get the tube to Battersea Power Station and walk along the river. I really pay attention to that walk, to the river, the chalk on the river bank and to the crows, that walk gets me out of my head and into my body. I typically start my day in the studio by making paint with pigment and linseed oil and chalk, and I make a painting medium with egg yolk and linseed oil and oil of cloves. The pigments I am using at the moment are those found in cave painting, and some of them have been collected from the Lot in France near to Pech Merle and Cougnac. My most used tools are a muller and board, flat ended paintbrushes and palette knives.
How has your work evolved in your latest project focusing on Cave Painting and crows? When we listen very carefully while holding in our hands material pigments that were once in the hands of or under the feet of or in the clothes on the backs of people from the past, we hold those people and we can hear them. It makes it possible to link from the past to the present in a kind of multiplicity, and to see alternative possibilities in the now. I am currently exploring aspects of grief and liveness by investigating Cave Painting and crows.
What do you hope people feel when they experience your art? What are you trying to express? I am aiming for a sensory experience that connects to grief and that cycles round within an economy or maybe even an ecology of empathy.
Is there an artist you feel a strong creative kinship with and would like to meet? Guiseppe Penone
How does music or literature shape your imagination? I do multi-disciplinary research which includes art, history, geology, anthropology, paleontology etc. I am thinking about possible futures where I would work with musicians collaboratively.
A great thing about living in my London is…
It has a lot of galleries, museums and a lot of green spaces. It is multi cultural and cosmopolitan which is rich.
Can you describe a project that challenged you creatively or emotionally—and how you worked through it? Projects are usually just problems to be solved, so that the problems are just a part of the process. Emotional blocks are another thing all together , and I have learned that it is best to wait it out, talk to friends and have a look at what it might be, given a bit of kindness to yourself and some lovely friends it usually works itself out, though it is painful.
Tell us about important teachers/mentors/collaborators in your life. Jesse Ash is my current tutor at the Royal college of Art. He is an incredible listener, and drops in your hands just what you need in terms of theory to look at or shows to go and see. Johhny Golding also RCA blow our minds with philosophy, and Kamani Vellodi drops me regular things to look at recommendations that are always perfect. I also had an amazing teacher in China called Prof Ding.
Sustainability in the art world is an important issue. Can you share a memory or reflection about the beauty and wonder of the natural world? Does being in nature inspire your art or your process? Being in nature does inspire my process, I collect pigments from natural sources and walking is the way I shift myself into my body ready to paint. I aim to make my practice as environmentally sustainable as possible. I have stopped using any volatiles this year so that my oil paints are made with oil, egg, chalk and water.
AI is changing everything - the way we see the world, creativity, art, our ideas of beauty and the way we communicate with each other and our imaginations. How do you see the future of creativity evolving alongside AI or Automation? What is the importance of human art and handmade creative works over industrialized creative practices? There is a special sensual place for hand made things, you can feel the hand of the person who made it in the object, and that is a real human touch. I also think that art works because we get a sense of the other person behind it. We sense someones presence in their brush marks. But its also possible to use AI to make great art, my friend Anna Brewer is doing that, by using it within a critical frame, and in combination with the hand made. I would argue that randomly generated AI images are not art they are something else. The use of AI in the Ed Atkins show at Tate Britain, critically and knowingly, is incredible as a mediator for intimacy. That show made me cry.
Exploring ideas, art and the creative process connects me to…
Other people across space and time, and to the life force in nature, that is held in our bodies and is channelled into making. It connects me to the spaces in between the rips and folds in life and nature where anything can happen. It gives me ways of troubling the present provocations in contemporary life, and troubling the absence in the public record of narratives of the people who at one time or another have been "othered".
