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Sara Birns

@sarabirns

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Represented by @matt_careywilliams📍London

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Sara Birns’ “Sierra” (2026) is the first painting that greets you as you enter the artist’s exhibition at my space on Porchester Place. She’s a curious figure is Sierra. Sporting a do-rag underneath a baseball cap (flipped to the side, of course), wearing simple jeans and just a plain T-shirt, one would assume this figure would sizzle with the choleric yet zippy apostasy of adolescence. There’s lots of ‘Kevin and Perry’ vibes being served here. Yet her face betrays wrinkles of saggy experience (in spite of her star tattoo), with her eyebrows - plucked to oblivion - now replaced with single, darting lines that somewhat amplify Sierra’s hardened quizzical mien into full-blown exasperated Eastenders barmaid. “Sierra” is an amalgamation of two separate, anonymous faces which the artist has purloined from an archive of photographs taken in the first few years of this century at various county fairs. Further faces from these annals populate the painting’s background, adding more spook and magic to a scene already embalmed by a palette of hazy mauves and stony greys. Heads twist improbably like those of the possessed; barely anyone stares out of the pictorial space to engage the viewer, evincing a mood both moody and shiveringly suspicious, negating its supposed collective, celebratory energy. I like to think that Sierra is, in fact, Sara herself (note the phonetic similarity between the two names), transported back in time to Santa Cruz’s County Fair from a far-away future, wearing clothes that she would have worn then as a teenager, but now wizened by hindsight and insight, trapped in a wormhole between then and now; between the fragmented facts of memory and the fixing fiction and future of invention. Such is the plight of entering the corn maze: you rush there to remember; you cannot wait to leave so you can forget. Yet you stay. ‘Scene XIX: Sara Birns, Corn Maze’ runs until Friday 25 September. Come see; all are welcome. #sarabirns #figurativepainting #artinlondon #cornmaze #contemporaryartist taken in Porchester Place by @sarabirns

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a month ago

This is my little shop window exhibition space. It’s on Porchester Place, just off Edgware Road in London. Cute, right? When I decided to go out on my own in July 2023, I anticipated staging only a handful of nomadic exhibitions. That changed when I took this space and began a programme of Scenes here (and Episodes elsewhere) in February 2024. This Thursday I open my 20th Scene with Graham Silveria Martin. Time sure does fly when you’re having fun. If business models aren’t malleable enough to accommodate ambition and change, then they’re not worth the envelope on which they’re written. I’ve taken my time with my curatorial project: made some space to think, build meaningful relationships with artists, collectors, curators and gallerists, and put together a terrific team. Now I’m ready to add another dimension to my project which offers more agency to artists and so, today, I couldn’t be prouder to announce my representation of Sara Birns, Lauren Brown and Dean Fox, and the co-representation of Nada Elkalaawy (with Gypsum Gallery in Cairo) and Theodore Ereira-Guyer (with Kutlesa Gallery in New York). This is a big moment in the evolution of my little enterprise. Building on my flexible presentation strategy, this additional agency will, likewise, be the result of my already deep engagement with the artists’ practices and the curatorial collaborations I’ve enjoyed with so many peers. Whether you label me a gallery, a project or just a shop-window, I want to remain nimble enough to present shows with many different artists; continue to lean towards those who are at the beginning of their artistic journey, whilst simultaneously devote more time to the artists I will now represent. And smile doing it. The art world paradigm fidgets endlessly and, today, I offer just another gentle itch of its structure. But one that fires up my huge excitement for the future of this little shop window, my team who look after it with me and the Scenes these five amazing artists - our artists - will put on there. We ready? We ready. Let’s do this … #artmarket #curatorialproject #artgallery #contemporaryart #londonartscene taken in Porchester Place by @sarabirns

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14 days ago

“Brain Diagram”
57x75cm
Watercolour, oil pastel and coloured pencil on 100% cotton paper

🧠 I’ve always wanted to make a brain diagram 🧠
Up now in the viewing room with @matt_careywilliams on 21 Connaught Street ❤️

One of my first watercolors 💧🌊

📸❤️ @showpickle taken in London, United Kingdom by @sarabirns

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7 months ago

I am mummified with melancholy this morning because today is our last day living inside Sara Birns’ crazy, beautiful, magnificent head. My nineteenth scene, “Corn Maze” - and my second solo presentation with Sara - closes today at 5pm. Thank you to everyone who came to see her show at my space on Porchester Place and took the time to look, see and really digest Sara’s extraordinary work. That’s all the love we need to keeps these wheels spinning. I want to offer my enormous gratitude to the brilliant Mollie E. Barnes for her fantastic essay on this new body of work by Sara. A huge thank you is also due to Alexei Izmaylov of Showpickle for documenting Sara’s work and installation and to Callum Crawford and Russ McClintock for their superb portraits of Sara taken in her studio. The loudest shout out - as always - goes to Eilidh and Danele for making all this magic happen with such love and care. But my heart is saved for Sara: an artist who invites us to dive into what initially feels like a pool of goopy abjection and otherness, but has us happily splashing about in the wonderful weirdness she spins within minutes because, you know what, that quirk and strangeness, that repugnance and grotesquerie, that’s our new fucking normal now. All Sara does is tell us where the maze is (it’s right in front of our noses, by the way) so that all we have to do is turn up, tune in and drop the fuck out. The Corn Maze might bewilder us, it might even frighten us, but, during these dark, ugly times we’re all living in, it just might fucking save us. ‘Scene XIX: Sara Birns, Corn Maze’ closes today at 6pm. Come see. #contemporarypainting #artinlondon #creepybutthanks #contemporaryartist #sarabirns taken in Porchester Place by @sarabirns

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25 days ago

“Circle of love”
100x100cm
Oil on linen

💎🌟💘💎
Today is the last day of my show! I’ll be at the gallery at 1pm today so come by and say hi 😘❤️🪽
@matt_careywilliams 📍12 Porchester pl, London by @sarabirns

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25 days ago

“When the Blood Leaves My Veins, and My Skin Turns to Grey, Will My Light be Ok”
73x60cm
Oil on Linen

This painting was done in Poland (mostly) about a year ago at the end of summer. I had been growing so many plants in my apartment. My balcony was covered in cherry tomatoes and herbs, my studio had two giant bean stocks growing across from each other at the door (kind of like this painting) and I had heavenly blues crawling up the walls in the living room. My apartment, and all of Poland was in full bloom, getting ready to shed the harvest. End of summer was my color pallet, and the aesthetics of Luna Lovegoods house. The light of summer was peaking, and darkness would soon fall. And those who I expressed my fear for how cold it was going to be (I hadn’t spent a winter in Poland yet) told me that the cold wasn’t the hard part of winter, it was the darkness. The sun would rise at about 8am and start leaving us around 3pm. And then the mist would come through and you could no longer see ahead of you. As long as you keep your mind focused on light, even the smallest match can light up an entire room. But I never ended up spending an entire winter in Poland, and moved on January 1st 🤷🏼‍♀️🤔😂🌌❄️🙅🏼‍♀️

This week is the last week this piece will be in view @matt_careywilliams by @sarabirns

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a month ago

We are now in the final week of our latest exhibition at our space on Porchester Place, ‘Scene XIX: Sara Birns, Corn Maze’. I’m already verklempt at the thought of saying goodbye to all of Sara’s wonderfully winsome little souls. The space will be open 10-6, Tuesday through Friday, and all are welcome. Come see. Portraits of Sara are by the wonderful Callum Crawford; all other photography is by the brilliant Alexei Izmaylov / Showpickle. #sarabirns #artinlondon #cornmaze #countyfair #artistsstudio taken in Porchester Place by @sarabirns

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One of the more deliciously darker paintings in my current exhibition - ‘Scene XIX: Sara Birns, Corn Maze’ - is a work called “Possessed by my Personality” which Sara painted whilst living in Poland between 2025 and 2026. It tingles in eldritch aberration as we join Sara and her partner, Adam, as they enter their apartment. Both bookend the composition so that the contrasting precision and illumination of their already quirky physiognomy acts like repoussoirs, drawing the viewer into a shadowy interior haunted by gossamer memories. These are the phantoms that possess Sara’s personality: originally sketched and thumb-nailed in the artist’s journals, these figures and forms are now let loose, tormenting and titillating subject and object with abject delight. These are the ghosts embedded in Sara’s own memories of county fairs or old apartments but they are joined by those ghosts of art history. At the top center of the composition we find the head of a swooning woman, adorned in Tudor head-dress, which Sara has purloined from Paul Delaroche’s decidedly camp description of “The Execution of Lady Jane Grey” (1833, London, National Gallery). Below this head, at centre bottom, we encounter an intense, goblin-like imp, staring out of the pictorial space, ignoring the two apparently quibbling faeries that float close by. Sara has, again, turned to the annals of 19th-century art - both its devotion to a charged figurative fidelity and, now, to an ethereal eccentricity - by quoting Richard Dadd’s “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke”. A painting Dadd made between 1855 and 1864 whilst incarcerated in a lunatic asylum after murdering his father. As you do. The transformation of death and madness thus whistles through this peculiar scene; no one figure, face, space or place remains stable. Instead we are plunged into a metaphysical maze where plumes of ‘will’, ‘are’ and ‘was’ are isolated like existential smoke, only to then coalesce and perfume time, space, fact, fiction, desire and dimension with its delectable discombobulation. Genius. Come see. #contemporaryart #artinlondon #figurativepainting #painter #sarabirns taken in Porchester Place by @sarabirns

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My current exhibition with the wildly talented painter, Sara Birns, zooms us through corn mazes of the artist’s memory, from county fairs in California to shared apartments in Poland. Sara describes the particular ‘feeling’ of the American County Fair as something she could only ‘see’ after moving outside of it. After all, memories can only ever ebb into mind once experience has flowed away, and much of this show explores that transformation of familiarity into flashback into fiction and back again. “The Feelings of Feeling” (2025-26) was painted during Sara’s time in Poland, living with her partner, Adam. Both are depicted here (in parts, at least); their eyes squeezing out of their almost conjoined, etiolated heads like extruded toothpaste, staring simultaneously at each other and at the viewer. Sara has brewed her own physiognomy with quotations of Adam’s face, notably his mouth. Their union - in shared hybridity - thus speaks to that struggle for authenticity or a desire to be - and be seen - as separate from the crowd: challenges amplified by the conundrums and quest posed by being lost in the corn maze. Sara knows that a remembered face - signifying a time, place or feeling - is rarely preserved with neutrality. The resulting profiles are uncannily convincing because she understands how aggressively we read them. How much we, as the viewer, want to believe that these faces (and the feelings they provoke) are real, even as we know, deep down, they are not. Sara’s delectable suspension of disbelief is achieved not by experiencing a feeling but by stepping back and observing how that feeling is, could or should be felt, with such mesmerising, excruciating fidelity. Very clever. Very telling. My nineteenth Scene at Porchester Place, ‘Sara Birns, Corn Maze’ is open this week between Tuesday and Friday, 10-6. Come see. Portraits by Alexei Izmaylov and Callum Crawford. Studio shots by Danele Evans and Eilidh Watson. Most words (the ones that make sense) by Mollie E. Barnes. #artinlondon #contemporaryart #paintingtoday #contemporarypainter #artistsstudio taken in Porchester Place by @sarabirns

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In Sara Birns’ “Circle of Love” (2026), faces turn toward one another in a reverse clock face while the central figure looks outward, directly confronting the viewer. We are thus quietly folded into Sara’s circuit, simply by looking. This fabulous painting is the Ferris Wheel of Sara’s homage to the County Fair: faces are arranged around an implied rotation, each caught in the orbit of the others. Self the sun; otherness being planets of possible personality. There is something tender yet also unnervingly claustrophobic about this painting, as the faces inexorably become one communal organism, wearing the same shirt, sharing the same body and breasts. Sara here works with (and pushes the usual boundaries of) traditional structures such as compositional or perspectival diagonals, thirds, old master procedures and carefully rendered fabrics. Note how the folds of clothing echo the fleshy folds of the heads’ necks and jowls. This is yet another extraordinary painting by Sara that pleases the eye in order to destabilise it. We are seduced by the faculty of their sublime execution; by the faithfulness of their rendition only for each greasy wrinkle, bloodshot eye and crooked tooth to not just open doors of perception but also usher in those pixies of abjection that skewer sense in the most bewildering, brilliant way. ‘Scene XIX: Sara Birns, Corn Maze’ runs until Friday 25 September at my space on Porchester Place in London. Portrait by Callum Crawford. Words courtesy of Mollie E. Barnes. Come see. #artinlondon #contemporarypainting #figurativeart #theuncanny #sarabirns taken in Porchester Place by @sarabirns

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I love painting and I have to do it. But for fun in my downtime I also love sewing. In spirit of crafts and sharing passions like at the county fair I designed and sewed my outfit for the show to share with everyone. My inspiration was victorian, oriental, Dolly Parton. It was really satisfying making the pieces, and felt even better wearing it.
I felt the fit would match my show with @matt_careywilliams very well 💁🏼‍♀️🍬🍭 up until sept 25th
🦋
Bolero was made from a traditional Chinese dress pattern I altered to be open and cropped. Corset was a modification from a sewing pattern and I hand sewn in the boning. Skirt was made copying another skirt I had and modifying it. The silk turquoise butterfly is hand sewn and patched onto the corset.
💎
My partner Adam’s mom has a bead business @ozbeads , so all the gemstones were gifts from her. The front clasp butterfly 🦋 I made with moonstones accompanied by a giant tear drop amethyst hanging from the clasp and a discrete amethyst skull looms above it. Moonstone droplets line the front and clear quartz (tear drop cut and raw points) with turquoise spheres lining the back. 💎💎 thanks Ewa !! 👸🏼💎🔮

The outfits made of 100% cotton- lining and outer. Make your outfits! I still wear things I’ve made 15 years ago. Choose fabrics that are natural and last forever, and when you make it, it’s special. Also🖕fast fashion by @sarabirns

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Episode 1 of The Bent Pod is out. Sara Birns - the first Bent Apprentice- on what painting actually feels like. Link in bio. 🎙️ available on apple and spotify by @sarabirns

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