statement: 

Since approximately 2015, my paintings have shifted from photo-based documentation of familial histories to observation-based paintings, recording views from ordinary life over extended periods. Both approaches end up being autobiographical. Most recently, the paintings combine several subjects taken from my quotidian surroundings, in addition to hand-painted text. Surfaces are filled with snippets of observed experience, frequently taken from domestic spaces. For example, a painting may combine collected feathers or shells with a sink full of dishes and a dress hung over a door, painted on different days and in various spaces. This merged imagery is interspersed with texts often describing my stream of consciousness or allusions to personal events and relationships. Text included in the paintings merges into the images, becoming partially illegible, while the images themselves merge or dissolve into washes. These paintings accrue over weeks and months, documenting what is at hand around me. The creation of these paintings is based on a practice of attention-giving and beauty-seeking, meditations on mindfulness, mortality, and existence. The text acknowledges a tension in seeking to find the ordinary sublime while my mind runs with to-do lists, death anniversaries, and replays of the past. Throughout the work, I am drawn to and transfixed by transitive states of light, especially shifts in perceived color. Translating this information through the mixing of pigment, bringing to life an image on a surface, allows meaning to emerge from that which might otherwise blend into the background of the everyday, much like the thoughts that float in and out of consciousness.

biography:

Sara Pedigo grew up in the American South. She received her MFA in Painting from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 2007. She is currently a Professor at Flagler College located in Saint Augustine, Florida, her undergraduate alma mater. Pedigo has exhibited nationally, with solo exhibitions at Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, Western Illinois University, Furman University, College of Southern Nevada, Barton College and Arts on Douglas, New Smyrna Beach, Florida and Wynn Bone Gallery in Annapolis, Maryland. Her numerous group exhibitions, include Drawing Discourse at the University of North Carolina, Asheville and Root to Bloom at Principle Gallery, Alexandria, VA. Additionally, her paintings were featured in the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2020 and at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC in 2006. Pedigo was honored with a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant in 2006 and a Community Foundation of Northeast Florida Grant in 2016. Her artwork has been the cover art for the following publications: Ivory Tower: A journal of poetry published by the University of Delhi, Play Button: Poems by Liz Robbins published by Cider Press Review and Minetta Review: a literary and arts publication at New York University.