Sarah Quayle moved to Helensburgh from Cambridgeshire aged 16 and quickly fell in love with Scotland and wanted to stay.  She graduated from Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen with a BA (hons) degree in Fine Art in 1996, specialising in drawing and painting.  After a year of working and travelling in Canada, she moved to Edinburgh where she had a WASPS studio at Dalry for seven years.  Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the UK.  In 2001, she qualified as an Occupational Therapist to help support her career as an artist.  She now lives in West Lothian.

Sarah’s practice has developed through an exploration of places and the memories, moments and stories attached to them.  She is interested in personhood and how we each have our own story: a patchwork of experiences and interactions with the world that make us who we are and influences future decisions and relationships in a continual process.  She is inspired by colour, pattern, metaphors, and words. 

Her small works are single records of experience.  She attempts to interweave these into larger paintings, combining them with narrative, memories (her own and those of others), imagined situations and a personal inventory of symbolic images. 

Sarah is also a writer and is currently working on a selection of short stories as well as developing some ideas for novels. She won the Scottish Arts Trust Short Story Award in 2021.