20/04/20 14:25
Graham Text for VL_blues.indd 6
LAVORO: -- NomeFile: 006_SarahGraham.pdf Posizione: 6 ]
COMMESSA: 530-20 - VRL - SARAH GRAHAM - .job FOGLIO: 1 LATO: B DESCRIZIONE: VRL - SARAH GRAHAM - FG 1
A LONG AND HAZARDOUS RIDE
Ruth Guilding
Riding our horses through a blizzard in the deserts of Turkmenistan, with threadbare clothing and socks for gloves, we were cold to the bone. For hours there had been no trees or hedges; no shelter at all: just an endless plain, brown and white against the low grey sky. The isolated workmen’s hut housed two silent men, a stove, two cot beds and some mice but it represented bliss. Nothing mattered, not the hard floor, the fleas, the howling gale threatening to lift the roof off. It was all part of the adventure I’d signed up for.
In 1999 sarah graham was not drawing. Instead, she had answered an advert on the Royal Geographical Society’s noticeboard to accompany the ‘quixotic travel writer’ Jonny Bealby in a long and hazardous ride along the old Silk Road from Kashgar in China to the Caspian Sea.
Graham had Masters degrees in history of art and fine art from Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art respectively, but a peripatetic, almost wild upbringing in Scotland and rural France had primed her for adventure. Loch Lomond and the coast of Scotland were home to the Grahams of Montrose, whose ancestry goes back to James i. Her father, Euan Graham, had been a wartime Group Commander in the raf, then Clerk to the House of Lords in civilian life. Here he went in for rackety escapades with his friend Alan Clark and kept a carpet python under his Pugin desk. Much older than the fathers of her friends, he gleefully flouted convention and encouraged his daughters to do likewise. On Sunday mornings in Wiltshire he gave them target practice, shooting into a copy of Who’s Who with an air rifle, then opening it to see which of the peers listed on its pages they had hit. But above all he was a naturalist, taking them on long walks in Scotland, or up rivers in
LAVORO: -- NomeFile: 007_SarahGraham.pdf Posizione: 7 ]
20/04/20 14:25
Graham Text for VL_blues.indd 8
LAVORO: -- NomeFile: 008_SarahGraham.pdf Posizione: 8 ]
COMMESSA: 530-20 - VRL - SARAH GRAHAM - .job FOGLIO: 1 LATO: A DESCRIZIONE: VRL - SARAH GRAHAM - FG 1
nature and nurture opposite above: Tollie Farm, Loch Maree, from the Gairloch to Poolewe Road, scene of many childhood holidays in Scotland. opposite centre and below: The farmhouse in rural Tarn-et-Garonne, south-western France, where the Graham family lived for three months every summer; Euan Graham instructs his
daughters Sarah and Alexandra who are drawing a grass snake. above: Nepenthes distillatoria –a tropical pitcher plant endemic to Sri Lanka – from a well-used copy of Joseph Paxton’s Magazine of Botany (1838), part of Graham’s mother’s collection of miscellaneous botanical materials.
Graham Text for VL_blues CORRECTED.indd 9 22/04/20 09:48
LAVORO: -- NomeFile: 009_SarahGraham_rev.pdf Posizione: 9 ]
VRL - SARAH GRAHAM - FG 1
a sketchbook is a laboratory Graham’s studies of spiky, dried or sharpedged geometric plant forms influenced and consolidated her drawing style, fusing with her appreciative knowledge of Sutherland’s fierce biomorphics to feed into her work ever since.
Drawings in pen, ink and pencil from a sketchbook dating from Graham’s trip to South Africa with her father in 2007.
‘We would walk for hours, my eyes on the ground, endlessly searching for plants and stones or bones, making quick drawings that I could then turn into independent forms back in the studio. I collected many dead proteas – attracted to their triffidlike forms. The harsh, dry landscape and wildfires there had stripped back their beauty to something almost skeletal’. Graham
LAVORO: -- NomeFile: 018_SarahGraham.pdf Posizione: 18 ]
LAVORO: -- NomeFile: 028_SarahGraham.pdf Posizione: 28 ]
rainforest at kew gardens
Broad-leafed vegetation transpires, blooms and jostles for space in a living laboratory contained beneath a soaring canopy of glass and cast iron; here species including those that are endangered or extinct in their native habitats are studied for research into medicine or sustainable cropping.
Botany research trip to the nineteenthcentury Palm House at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
‘Kew’s palm house yields a vast spectrum of potential subject matter for me, home to the best tropical plant specimens.’
LAVORO: -- NomeFile: 029_SarahGraham.pdf Posizione: 29 ]
Graham Text for VL_blues.indd 66 20/04/20 14:28
LAVORO: -- NomeFile: 066_SarahGraham.pdf Posizione: 66 ]
LAVORO: -- NomeFile: 069_SarahGraham.pdf Posizione: 69 ]
Graham Text for VL_blues.indd 101
LAVORO: -- NomeFile: 101_SarahGraham.pdf Posizione: 101 ]
Tailless Whipscorpion, 2011 ink on paper·46⅞ x 70⅞ in·119 x 180 cm
20/04/20 14:42
Graham Text for VL_blues.indd 146
LAVORO: -- NomeFile: 146_SarahGraham.pdf Posizione: 146 ]
Medinilla magnifica VII, 2018
Ink on paper·53⅛ x 72½ in·135 x 184 cm
LAVORO: -- NomeFile: 149_SarahGraham.pdf Posizione: 149 ]
In Memory of Karsten Schubert 1961
2019
Published in 2020 by Ridinghouse
ridinghouse 46 Lexington Street, London w1f 0lp ridinghouse.co.uk
Distributed in the uk and Europe by cornerhouse publications c/o Home, 2 Tony Wilson Place Manchester m15 4fn cornerhousepublications.org
Distributed in the United States and Canada by artbook | d.a.p. 75 Broad Street, Suite 630 New York, New York 10004 artbook.com
Texts © Ruth Guilding
For the book in this form © Ridinghouse All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A full catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
isbn 978 1 909932 58 6
Ridinghouse Publisher: Sophie Kullmann
Edited by Linda Schofield
Designed by Dalrymple
Set in Custodia and Sweet Sans
Printed in Italy by Verona Libri
photo credits:
© Camerarts Inc. (courtesy of Hazlitt): pp.132–3
© Miguel Flores-Vianna: pp.2–3, 6, 12–13, 23, 24–5, 28–9, 30–2, 42–4, 47, 172–4
© Sarah Graham: pp.40–1
Cover: Nuphar and Ranunculus, 2016
Ink on paper·47 x 70½ in·119.5 x 179 cm
Frontispiece: Meconopsis baileyi II , 2019
Ink on paper·72½ x 53⅛ in·184 x 135 cm
Endpapers: details of Graham’s colour reference chart which provide an accurate register of all the coloured inks that she has used in her work.
© Reto Guntli (courtesy of Tino Zervudachi): pp.68–9
© Eric Piasecki / otto (designed by Peter Pennoyer Architects): pp.124–5
© Stephanie Wolff: pp.76–7, 148–9
All remaining photography not stated above courtesy of Lyndsey Ingram.
Ridinghouse
LAVORO: -- NomeFile: 176_SarahGraham.pdf Posizione: 176 ]