Sarah Medway’s abstract paintings are a delicate, evocative, and sincere investigation into the nature of light as it manifests itself through the myriad environments that surround us. She navigates us through the different seasons, sometimes on foreign shores – from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia and beyond – other times closer to her canal-side studio in central London. She leads us through different times of day and night, from dawn to dusk and long into the night. She takes us up to the skies, into sunlight and shade, clouds and fog, rainbows and sunsets. She takes us into fields, along the coastline, and far out to sea. With her distinctive vocabulary of abstract marks and shimmering palettes, her works build into complex webs of patterns and textures that capture something of the experience of perceiving light, color, and shapes as they filter through the atmosphere into our eyes, minds, memories, and subconscious.
That Medway’s works take us on different journeys, into different environments and out to sea is certainly apt, as the body of work presented in this latest monograph on the artist takes the form of 56 canvases that were commissioned for display on the new P&O Cruises Britannia, the largest and highest-specification cruise ship built by the company to date, making regular voyages into the Med, to the Fjords, to the Canaries, the Caribbean, and beyond. This substantial commission is one of the latest in a long line of commissions by P&O of original works of art by living artists. For the publication, specially commissioned texts by eminent art critics Andrew Lambirth and Sue Hubbard offer an illuminating and insightful introduction to Medway’s oeuvre and to this significant new series of paintings.
In addition to having participated in group exhibitions at institutions including Tate Britain, the Whitechapel, the Royal Academy, the World Trade Center, and Austin Museum of Art, Medway has had solo exhibitions at venues including Flowers East, London, Chelsea Hotel, New York, Kienbaum Gallery, Frankfurt, The Mandalai, Thailand, and Atelier Gallery, Spain. She has works in many public, private, and corporate collections in the UK, US, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Hong Kong, and Thailand. Published by Anomie, the monograph has been designed by Peter B. Willberg with James Sutton, and printed in Italy by Castelli Bolis.
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Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist, broadcaster and art critic. Twice winner of the London Writers Competition and winner of third prize in the National Poetry Competition, her publications include Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon), Ghost Station and The Forgetting and Remembering of Air (Salt), The Idea of Islands: a collaboration with the artist Donald Teskey (Occasional Press, Ireland). Twenty of her poems appeared in Oxford Poets 2000: an Anthology (Carcanet) and, as the Poetry Society’s only Public Art Poet, she was responsible for London’s largest public art poem, Eurydice, at Waterloo. Her poems have been read on Poetry Please, The Verb and Front Row and appeared in The Irish Times, The Observer and numerous magazines and anthologies and have been recorded for the Poetry Archive.
Her prose and novels include Rothko’s Red: short stories (Salt), Depth of Field (Dewi Lewis) and Girl in White (Cinnamon Press). Her third novel, Rainsongs, is published by Duckworth, UK, Overlook Press, US, Mercure de France and Yilin Press, China.
As an art critic she has written regularly for The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, Time Out, The New Statesman and many leading art magazines. Her selected art writings Adventures in Art is published by Other Criteria.
She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and twice been a Hawthornden Fellow. In 1999 she was awarded a major Arts Council award to finish her second novel.
