Born in the Scottish Highlands, Sarah graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1997.
She moved to Cornwall for 10 years, seeking an ‘on the edge’ location to develop her work. In 2010 she moved to Wales. She moved to Aberystwyth to learn under the tutelage of master lithographer Paul Croft T.M.P. and graduated with an MA distinction in Fine Art in 2015.

In 2018 Sarah won 1st Prize at the Glynn Vivian Open and also had a solo exhibition at Oriel Q in Narberth. She has undertaken artist residencies at Cil Rialaig Project in West Ireland, Wasps Studios in Shetland and Elysium Gallery in Swansea.
Sarah has had many solo exhibitions with Belgrave Gallery in St. Ives and is also represented in Wales by Gallery Ten in Cardiff. She works mostly in oils and has her own small lithography press at home.

The flower paintings we have on show under-go the same treatment as her landscape paintings. Below are some quotes about Sarah’s work.

‘Sarah Poland paints the landscape. More precisely she paints her landscape: a landscape informed by folk tradition; by storytelling and magic; by the melding of the awesome and the everyday. She paints how she feels about her landscape in a defiantly and broadly Romantic way, and seeks truth and understanding in her representation of nature. She describes a painting process in which the image is allowed to grow from the medium. Composition and structure take precedence over detail, and everything that falls between the two (and that follows thereafter) is a matter of instinct…she exists in her paintings to the same degree that she exists in her landscape, and it would seem that the landscape lives in her in equal measure. A need to discover a better way of living and understanding fuels this show’s artistic fire, revealing itself not only in the paintings illustrated, but also in the quietly determined and engaging works that constitute the complete exhibition.’ Richard Blackborrow, Belgrave Gallery, St. Ives

‘One of the strongest works exhibited by a Cornish gallery had to be the rugged scene in oil entitled Mountain Pass by Sarah Poland. There is something of the wrestled drawing process of Bomberg or Kossoff in her landscape paintings which arrests the eye and brings you back time and again to the best of her pictures.’ Henry Garfit, founder of Newlyn School of Art, writing on the London Art Fair.