Sarah Sanford is an artist and art educator whose practice incorporates photography, printmaking, drawing and installation to create hidden worlds of biological landscapes and scientific abstractions. Capturing the physical nature of light is a dominant component to the imagery she creates. Drawn to its’ ethereal properties and transient nature, her work explores themes of time passage, impermanence and interconnectedness.
Trained as a printmaker, Sanford’s work investigates the changing paradigm of the surface of the contemporary print in relationship to the lens and technology in the post-digital age. Her work often employs the halftone grid as a tool to manipulate and break down photographic images serving as context for the captured fleeting fragments of visual information we encounter in our daily lives.
Sanford exhibits her work nationally and internationally. A selection of past sites include Rubicon Gallery, Dublin; London Contemporary Art Fair; Wrexham Print International, Yale College, Wales; Edinburgh Printmakers; School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Newman University, Wichita; and Mixografia in Los Angeles with participation in the invitational group exhibition, Printstallations, at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. Sanford has been the artist in resident at The Edinburgh Academy and the Taigh-Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Center, Scotland and a visiting artist at SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) Lacoste, France. Her work has been featured in publications that include the international print magazine, E-squared: Art + Science, The Hand Magazine and The California Printmaker.
Sanford is a Teaching Professor of Print Media and Drawing at the University of California Santa Cruz. She holds a Masters in Fine Art in Printmaking from the Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland and a Bachelor of Science in Art Education from the joint program of Case Western Reserve University & The Cleveland Institute of Art. Her professional memberships have included exhibiting with Edinburgh Printmakers, California Society of Printmakers and the Los Angeles Printmakers. In addition she presents lectures and printmaking workshops at various institutions that include Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop, Scotland; Indiana University, Bloomington; and the Academy of Art, San Francisco. She works out of her studio amongst the Redwoods of Bonny Doon, CA nestled in the Santa Cruz Mountains.