Contemporary collage artist Sarah Jarrett wants you to “embrace the eccentric,” and she leads by example: From her home in the quiet English countryside, the PureHoney featured artist for August begins our online video interview surrounded by towers of books and manic pixie meme girl looks as she settles in to consider her long career.
“Most of my images explore the human relationship with nature in some way,” Jarrett says. “I love botanicals; I love metaphors, symbolism, folklore, and fairy tales.” These influences are often distilled into images of elegant women who appear to exist simultaneously in Northern Renaissance paintings (1425-1500) and Pop Surrealist glossy magazines. Picture Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling and Hi-Fructose magazine all at once. Jarrett’s work — portraiture with uncanny flourishes that draw the eye again and again — conjures quite the visual spell.
Her style emerged from years of training in photography at the Harrow School of Art & Brighton University, with a later focus on textiles — which harmoniously meld to create brightly colored vignettes filled with exotic flora and fauna that, while beautiful, appear just a little bit off. Textures and patterns overflow and envelop eyes, lips, and hair so that every part of the body has its own decorative flourish.
To add an element of the strange, Jarrett might flip an eyeball upside down or replace a mouth with a flower — flowers are metaphors to her — and pin another closed mouth elsewhere to the visage. One particularly goth piece is of a woman in a demure white gown wearing a delicate crown atop her head — and baring the bloody maw of a vampire, slightly ajar and stained, as if she’s sizing up the viewer. “When making that sort of work, there is a thin line between things looking too realistic or too imaginary,” Jarrett says. “Trying to get the balance of that right is quite a difficult thing.”
 Spectra |
 Changeling |
 The Rainbow |
When the analog portion of the creative act is done, she uses the Procreate app to add and subtract, sculpt imagery, and fill in colors. Her illustrations — combining Europe’s art-historical past and storytelling with a postmodernist storytelling bite — are the covers for recent editions of novels by Isabel Allende, Ann Patchett and more. She also licenses pieces for album covers and product designs — “from Jigsaw Puzzles to Wine Labels,” she writes on her Web site.
With decades of practice to her credit, Jarrett says, “As you get older, you develop more confidence in being open to exploring different ideas and accepting when things do or don’t work. In my 20s, I would have been really nervous about that. But in my 50s, I feel like there is a huge amount of confidence and risk-taking in your artwork at an older age because you are less frightened of making mistakes, and I think that’s really freeing and quite liberating for a lot of artists as well. I don’t feel frightened anymore of trying different things. I say to myself, ‘It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work, just try it.’”
She listens to music for inspiration — Radiohead, Nils Frahm, Pink Floyd, Ólafur Arnalds, Aphex Twin and William Basinski, to name a few — and employs a variety of tools and source materials to realize her otherworldly creatures. She visits vintage fairs to look for old ephemera and often pairs her finds with her own photographic work. With such a focus on fairy tales, books are a huge draw.
 Old Times |
 The Persistence of Memories |
 I Just Fell in Love |
“My mum was really creative with words. She was a writer,” Jarrett says. “So it’s her that inspired me to read a lot and to always be surrounded by books: picture books, story books, and that opened doors, really, to the idea of using your imagination, and we lived a kind of really idyllic childhood where we were just kind of lost in stories and books and going to see ballets or plays. We were surrounded by very creative opportunities. I’m really grateful particularly to Mum for that. She really instilled in us that there isn’t just this world; in your mind and in your imagination, there are all kinds of other worlds that exist.”
Visit sarahjarrettart.com ~ Kelli Bodle
