Sarah Dakhili

My creative practice moves between painting, photography and writing. Each offers me a different way of looking, noticing and making sense of what I encounter, both in the world around me and within myself. Painting is where I work most intuitively. I am drawn to colour, texture, movement and layered surfaces, often taking inspiration from nature without needing to represent it literally. I might begin with an idea, an image, a colour or a feeling, but the work changes as I make it. Paint is added, scraped away, covered and revealed. I am learning to trust what emerges rather than trying to control the outcome.
 
Photography asks me to slow down and look more closely. I am fascinated by things that might otherwise go unnoticed, the patterns in tree bark, the structure of a leaf, weathered surfaces, architecture, light, shadow and unexpected compositions. Through the camera, something ordinary can become abstract, unfamiliar or unexpectedly beautiful. Photography, for me, is increasingly about ways of seeing.
Writing gives me another language entirely. It allows me to explore experience more directly, the contradictions, relationships, changes, losses, discoveries and ordinary moments that shape a life. I write from within experience rather than waiting until I have neatly understood it, often discovering what I think only once I begin putting words around it.
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Across all three, I am interested in the relationship between the external and internal worlds. A landscape can become a feeling. The surface of a tree can become an abstract composition. A lived experience can become a story in which someone else recognises something of themselves.
I am still discovering my visual and creative language, and I think that uncertainty is part of the work. I don't want everything resolved before I begin. There needs to be room for surprise, experimentation and change.
 
I don't need to know exactly what something means before I make it. Sometimes the making is how I find out.