December 5th, 2025
Sarah Knill Jones
Text archive:
Our visit to Sarah Knill Jone’s studio in Poush, located in Auberverliiers, took place on December 5th. Recently honored with a special commendation at the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize in the UK, Sarah, following her exhibition 'Shifting Selves'—which includes her work from her (Dis-)Appearing Woman project, exploring the disconnection felt as a non-local person, and a reflection on both personal freedom and the nature of freedom at the IESA Gallery—deeply engages with life drawing as the foundation of her practice. Seamlessly transitioning between drawing, painting, and performance, Sarah invites us to discuss the connection between the subject matter and the chosen medium in her studio.
About Sarah Knill-Jones:
Raised in Scotland Sarah Knill-Jones studied at the Glasgow School of Art and obtained her Master in Fine Art from the University of the Arts London. Her practice incorporates print making, video, performance and collaborative experiments, but the core remains centred in, on and around paint, as a visceral, human response to the world we live in.
A strong and consistent dedication to the practice of life drawing underpins Sarah's work, where a key concern is the human form and its relation to the monstrous. She layers and works her pieces into a disorienting fluid ambiguity where form and color seem to lose their integrity. These visual strategies contribute to a sense of estrangement that fluctuates between destruction and generation, giving form to a state of flux that echoes her experience of having to unwillingly relocate.
She has had solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art Baku and The Centre for Contemporary Art, Baku Azerbaijan. Her work is included in the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize London this autumn. Past duo and group shows include: Wander Lines in Paris 2022, A Cable I Have no Knife to Cut with Boryana Petkova at Poush Clichy, 2022, This Year’s Model Studio 1.1, London 2020, The Passion according to G.H, Despina, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, curator Raphael Fonseca, Tripp Gallery London 2016, The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh 2016, and also Zagat and Largo das Artes in Rio de Janeiro amongst many others. She taught at the Academy of Fine Art in Baku, is co-founder and director of ALOV project Baku, and been on residency with Trélèx in Switzerland, Proyecto ‘Ace Buenos Aires, Despina Rio de Janeiro, and currently with Poush! Manifesto Aubervilliers, Paris.
Her work can be found in the collections of The Modern Art Museum Baku, The Victoria and Albert Museum London, The University of Northampton UK and private collections around the world.
