Sally Weekes

Sally is an Artist in collaboration with Nature.  A practice that carries both privilege and responsibility and one that channels her deepest anxieties, moods and feelings into faith in the wood, in nature, and in herself.
 
Wood is her canvas.  Not as a passive surface, but as something alive with story.  Every slice of grain carries the autobiography of a tree: the seasons celebrated, the years accumulated, the world that shaped it.  At any one time, her workshop holds an extraordinary collection of lives, each from a different corner of the earth.  In a nutshell, she puts the “woo” back into wood.
 
Sally’s practice is rooted in pareidolia; the human instinct to find meaning in pattern.  Where others see material, she sees narrative. She follows the grain with her imagination and discovers the stories held within it.  We humans share 50% of our DNA with trees, and an MRI scan of the human body is surprisingly similar to a cross-section of veneer.  We are more connected to the natural world than we often remember.
 
To bring each story to life, Sally draws on oil paint, watercolour, pastels, pencils, inks and natural pigments, alongside water from the sea or lake, wherever her inspiration lives.  Every choice is guided by the grain.  Once told, she seals the story into the wood with oil, as though it has always been there, waiting to be found.
 
Sally works from humble layered ply to increasingly rare and precious cuts, because every piece has something to say.  Each one is unrepeatable, just as every person is, and that is something to marvel at.