Bio

Sally Trewartha is a contemporary artist whose practice explores love, growth and connection through drawing and research-led work. Working primarily with watercolour and ink, she uses line as a way of thinking through natural systems, translating processes of growth, pressure and transformation into visual form.

Trewartha’s practice is grounded in an exploration of human connection: responsibility, interdependence, community and love. Her abstract works on paper seek to evoke the subtle exchanges that pass between people, particularly within the ordinary moments which accumulate to build our everyday life. She is interested in how relationships endure across time and distance and in the traces we leave on one another. The silent and repetitive nature of love, especially a mothers love, and as love as a practice. 

She is heavily influenced by authors such as Tiya Miles and bell hooks who encourage us to look at love as a powerful force rather than something sentimental or weak. Artists such as Ai Wei Wei and El Anatsui in their use of repetitive action and accumulation describe how sustained, labour-intensive processes can embody care, attention and devotion, transforming simple gestures into something greater than the sum of its parts.

Her perspective is informed by her role as Chairperson of a small charity, advocating for individuals with a rare syndrome and by her experience of raising a child with additional needs. These experiences have deepened her engagement with questions of care, dependency and collective responsibility and continues to shape her understanding of the world.

Living on the edge of Epping Forest, Trewartha draws ongoing inspiration from the natural environment. The forest forms both a physical and conceptual grounding for her work, where systems of growth and connection in nature echo those found within human experience. Through repetitive mark-making, her drawings map imagined internal structures, sitting between observation and speculation. The work reflects an interest in interconnected systems and considers how these might be understood through drawing. 

Through her practice, she seeks to make visible the often unseen networks that bind both ecological and human life.