Sarah M Newton

Instagram: @sarahmnewton

Website: http://sarahmnewton.com

Bio: Sarah Newton is a San Francisco artist who works primarily on paper in a variety of media including drawing, etching, and woodblock printing. In her work Sarah often focuses on spaces and details of the everyday built environment that generally exist at the periphery of attention. Her drawings have been included in New American Paintings, and Manifest Gallery’s International Drawing Annual #14. . Sarah has also been a featured artist for the San Francisco Center for the Book's Roadworks printmaking event, was invited to create an artist's book, That's It, Liquor Beer Wine, published by the SFCB's Imprint Publications, and has recent solo and group exhibitions in the Bay Area, London, and Yokohama. Artist residencies include Playa, Monson Arts, Penland school of Craft, and VCCA. She has a degree in printmaking from the California College of the Arts.

Statement: For the last few years I have been walking sections of the San Francisco Bay shoreline, following the map of the SF bay trail’s as-yet incomplete segments; this planned 500-mile path has been under construction for 30 years but only about 350 miles have so far been built, and it exists in discontinuous pieces. Visiting the broken lines on the map takes me to places outside of public use, unimproved lands that still contain the remnants of the maritime and military past of the shoreline, areas of infrastructure and industry that are overlooked. The landscape is transitional, not only due to the Bay Area’s appetite for developable land, but also as a result of gradual land subsidence and rising sea level. I have been sketching, photographing, and making drawings of the unimproved landscape as I go. These drawings included here are of the discernible endpoints of the trail sections where they hit the construction sites, industry, and restricted areas that prevent the trail from completing the circuit. Many of those obstacles, like airports, petroleum storage tanks, power stations, are linked directly to the future changes that could imperil their own surroundings. Accompanying a series of ink and gouache landscape drawings on paper, larger drawings on yupo focus on small details from the environment, modest built barriers found at the tideline drawn large and with meticulous care.