'I'm always trying to get to the feeling of a place-not just how it looks, but the atmosphere and what that means to me as an artist and, potentially, to the work's viewers. I build up the work in layers, and that process helps me let go of the literal image and find something quieter and more personal.'
Sandra Moffat's work centres on landscape, light, and memory. Her paintings often start with places she knows-coastal towns, harbours, tenement skylines, distant hills-but they are not literal renderings. Instead, her process allows the imagery to shift and settle through layers of texture, media and adjustment. What emerges is something more atmospheric than descriptive, more felt than fixed.
With a background in textiles, Sandra's approach to painting is tactile and constructed. She works in mixed media-typically acrylic and collage on board or card-building surfaces in layers, then drawing out form, line and colour. Her use of texture is key, giving her work a physical depth that mirrors the emotional tone of the subject matter. Each piece is developed slowly, often reworked several times, allowing space for the painting to evolve and take on its own rhythm.
Sandra is interested in how we remember places-not just what they look like, but the way they sit with us afterwards. This interest in remembered landscape gives her work a quiet, reflective quality. Structures may be simplified or fragmented; perspectives may be flattened or slightly abstracted. Light and shadow play an important role, not only in creating contrast but in shaping mood.
While the work is rooted in observation, it is never photographic. Her intention is not to document but to distil-to pull something essential from a place or moment and allow it space on the canvas. 'I'm always trying to get to the feeling of a place-not just how it looks, but how it sits with you. I build up the work in layers, and that process helps me let go of the literal image and find something quieter and more personal.'
Sandra's work continues to evolve, but consistently reflects her interest in the emotional pull of landscape, and in the way surface, structure and space can carry meaning beyond representation.