Sarah Philips

Sarah Philips is an artist from Burnett Heads, Queensland, currently residing in Brisbane.
Her work focuses on themes of connection, memory and transience, and is heavily influenced by time spent on the ocean and the coasts growing up. Philips specialises in marine still lifes and seascapes, as well as portraiture.

Philips is far from the first or the last painter to be obsessed with the ocean. That said, a little context about her relationship with it could be of interest when considering her work.

The ocean is something her dad gave her- or less poetically, he passed his passion along, as his father did to him. To Philips’ grandfather, the ocean was a living, and a way to feed his family. He took Philips’ dad and his brother out on the boat with him from as early as they can recall, and her father and uncle still fish to this day, often together. As her dad grew older, and life threw the curveballs it does to so many of us, it came to mean more.

Living in coastal Bundaberg, Philips’ parents took her to the beaches and rivers often. On the ordinary side of things, Dad taught her to enjoy the ocean with fishing, catching ghost crabs, and getting a good amount of air in the boat by hitting a wave at speed at just the right (wrong) angle. Ordinary joys, not to be minimised.

As Philips grew and, like her father, took a few curveballs, he taught her probably the most impactful lesson she’s had. In a world that Philips struggled with socially as a child, and in a family that, while loving, was saturated with depression, he provided an extraordinary notion. The ocean, as a balm. As company when lonely, as calm when you’ve been shaken, and as beauty when the ugliness of the world and the actions of people make you ache for it.
A part of the world that does not fail to remind you why you would want to be in it.