British Artist Sarah Cunningham Passes Away at 31
**The Life and Work of British Painter Sarah Cunningham (1993-2024)**
Sarah Cunningham, an emerging British abstract painter known for her large-scale landscapes blending natural beauty with abstraction, tragically passed away at the age of 31. Her death was confirmed by the Lisson Gallery, which began representing her work in 2023. In a heartfelt statement, the gallery mourned the loss of “an incredibly talented, intelligent, and original artist whose deep yet intuitive creations connected profoundly with many.”
## Artistic Style: The Essence of Cunningham’s Work
Cunningham’s paintings are a vivid interpretation of nature through abstract, fluid canvases. Her use of oil paint allowed her to craft striking landscapes driven by sweeping, gestural brush strokes. These movements represented more than painterly technique — they indicated a philosophical approach to art, blurring the lines between humanity and the natural world. Her works resonate with an exploratory spontaneity that evokes boundless ecosystems dissolving before the viewer’s eyes into wild abstraction, leaving behind raw emotion and instinct.
Her most well-known works, including *I Will Look Into the Earth* (2023), showcase this blend of abstraction and landscapes, with organic compositions that seem to spill beyond the frame, reminiscent of the chaotic yet ordered evolution of natural environments.
## Early Life and Background
Born in Nottingham, England, in 1993, Cunningham spent much of her childhood in the woodlands, forming a deep connection to nature that would later influence her art. Though always drawn to creative pursuits, her path to becoming a full-time artist wasn’t straightforward. While studying for her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Loughborough University, she juggled multiple jobs to support her practice, including driving a van filled with “smoothie-making bikes” across the UK. It was during these formative years that she developed a nocturnal style of working, creating most of her pieces at night.
## Exploration and Growth: Art Residencies Shaping Her Practice
One of the crucial milestones in Cunningham’s career occurred during her artist residency in 2018. She ventured to the remote Indigenous Guna community in Armila, Panama, as part of the La Wayaka Current Artist Residency. Here, she immersed herself in local traditions, working with the materials provided by the villagers after her own supplies were lost in transit. Cunningham was particularly inspired by the Guna’s practice of collective dream analysis, a spiritual aspect that deeply influenced her work going forward. This experience, within the biodiverse surroundings of Panama’s rainforests, helped her fine-tune her approach to art, where nature and metaphysical themes converged seamlessly on canvas.
It was during this residency that Cunningham began to explore the more spiritual, transient aspects of the natural world — approaching painting as a medium for representing not just the physical landscapes, but also the emotions, dreams, and memories tied to those spaces.
## Education and Professional Breakthroughs
In 2019, Cunningham pursued her graduate studies at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, where she further honed her craft and found a more distinct voice in her work. It was at RCA where she came across the writings of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. His text *The Crystal Forest*, which examines Amazonian spirituality and the animistic connection between humans and their environments, profoundly influenced Cunningham’s outlook on painting.
Inspired by these visions of multiplicity and layered perspectives, Cunningham began to intertwine these elements into her paintings. Specifically, she embraced these ideas in her solo exhibitions, such as *The Crystal Forest* (2023) at Lisson Gallery.
Cunningham’s work began to garner wider attention after her debut solo show at Almine Rech gallery’s New York location in 2022. Her show, titled *In its Daybreak, Rising*, introduced her unique abstract landscapes to a broader audience and solidified her presence in the contemporary art scene.
## A Deep Connection to Nature
An overarching theme in Cunningham’s work is the way she collapsed the boundaries between the personal, the environmental, and the mythical. Her engagement with natural landscapes was not simply about realizing the “aesthetic” beauty of nature, but instead about understanding its complexities and applying her own human experiences to those interpretations.
In talking about her 2023 solo exhibition *The Crystal Forest*, Cunningham explained how she sought to ”
cultivate a forest-like mindfulness” in her studio, creating a mental and emotional space that mimicked the unseen, unspoken rhythms of the natural world. This affinity for the wilderness was not romanticized; instead, it was grounded in her recognition of an inherent connection — one in which humans are inextricably linked to the ecosystems that surround them.
## Legacy in Art: Exhibitions and Public Collections
Cunningham’s passing at such a young age has left a profound silence in the art world, particularly within the environmental and abstract art communities that embraced her work. Despite her brief career, Cunningham made a powerful impact.