About the Artist
Sandra Cavanagh’s work is a successive reaction to events of either personal or general concern focusing on the emotional traces of such events on private and public spheres. Her starting point is thus idea and feeling, and the purpose of her process is to codify both. A narrative series on the mythological feminine becomes a chance to explore patriarchal brutality and its weight on the collective, a small drawing made in a hospital waiting room is transposed into a digital image of startling color and mutation, drawings from a fairytale stage common concerns over understanding mortality and the loss of innocence as prerequisites to our humanity.
Cavanagh’s intricate pencil and pen and ink drawings, gestural brushwork in large oil paintings, musings on color in digitized images, all reference an inexhaustible curiosity over subject and materials. She works across media and makes use of varying degrees of figuration and abstraction, considering them both forms of the present age. Her digital, landscape and untitled series sequence composition and color through visceral experience, climatic moods and time, further underlying her interest in pictorial narratives. She tends to work in series, creating storylines with some urgency to either exhaust a subject to the point of understanding or unburdening herself of it. This annotation of feelings underscores her dramatic approach to form and message.
Most recently two events, a diagnosis of cancer and subsequent treatment, and the death of the artist's mother found daily echos in themes of loss within the entire human community during the pandemic. Experienced as a dialogue of feelings between artist and the world, spanning grief, solidarity and even joy over acts of compassion, resilience and humor, the past year proved a fruitful stage in the production of several large paintings, series of drawings, prints and self portraits, all of which reference themes of life and death.
Cavanagh read Social Sciences at the University of Belgrano, Buenos Aires before undertaking a Fine Art Foundation Year and BA degree course majoring in Illustration at the Kent Institute of Art and Design (K.I.A.D.), University of Kent, UK.