Sarah Dixon (aka Arachne) is an artist, animator, photographer and designer based in West London.
Artist’s Statement
An impulse to draw and make things has always been with me. My imagination identifies most deeply with the natural world and in particular the incredible richness of the rainforest. This led me to work in the Amazon as a biologist some years ago but now I practice in the UK in a range of art forms.
The key themes in my work are symbolism and living beings; I am interested in the latent symbolic meaning of living creatures, and how this inner meaning can be developed to reach into magical realms, such as the transmogrificati0n of the spirit into different life forms. I study wild plants as well as animals.
I am particularly fascinated by human faces and therefore portraiture is central to my interests, but also icon painting in which the icon and the myth and meaning of the image become magical and provide a window into the divine.
Fairy tales, mythologies, religions, animal spirits, plant spirits, all speak to me.
I also just make odd drawings of whatever comes into my head and these are the most inspired moments of all.
Background
At school, I was good at maths as well as art, and at some point it was decided that time was not to be spent in the art room but in the Physics lab. IN a gap year after school I got to study Renaissance drawing methods in Florence and bronze casting at the Slade School of Art.
Subsequently, an abortive attempt to study Physics at Manchester University led to the creation of one of my favourite pieces, an oil pastel painting of a wild creature lost in a forest.
Regathering my public self I entered UCL to study Biology which was incredibly exciting. I was able to see images of living cells working in my head and longed to be able to project these pictures for others to see and be able to understand these amazing cellular processes.
I also joined expeditions to Ecuador in which I collected butterflies and studied walnuts. This began my interest in plants and how humans connect with them (ethnobotany).
After UCL I led an expedition to Amazonian Ecuador in Shiwiar territories. I came back exhausted but recalling that my happiest moments were sitting at the hut painting plants in watercolour. I learned from the Shiwiar that plants and animals have spirits and that they can come to you in dreams and teach you, converse, warn you of threats, poison you and generally be part of one’s social life.
Dreams and daily life are equally real and not seen as separate. There is no ‘subconcious’ or ‘unconscious’ – there is an alternate consciousness. It seems to me a form of highly developed intuition – the body being able to communicate with the intellect using a symbolic inner language. This ability we seem to have almost lost in our culture – it makes Freud look like a prize idiot, let alone the rest of us.
After that I studied Corporate Design at the London College of Printing, so as to earn my living from design and not whatever I was trying to do before that.
Ever since I’ve been going more and more towards Art, including making animation, photographs, Super8 films, and felt. I have studied portrait painting with Henry Liam Ward in London, and icon painting with Nikitas Sofokli while attending Cyprus College of Art summer school in Cyprus.
