“Where has all the nature gone?
I wonder if we blew it
What if the fishes and their flowers
Have just gone and left us to it?”

-       Sarah Mitchell

Inspired by the unique flora and fauna of the Cooloola Coast region, delightful local artist Sarah Mitchell combines hand-coloured linocut prints with her distinctive droll poetry to create a fantastical world of charming and colourful creatures designed to make us think about the impact we have on our environment.  Without resorting to preaching or criticising, Sarah draws on imagination and humour to encourage the viewer to reflect on how we use fish, beetles etc in our day to day lives without a second thought for their welfare.

Originally from Braintree in England, Sarah moved with her family as a child to a tiny village in County Wicklow, Ireland.  After gaining an honours degree in graphic design from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin in 1979, Sarah obtained a one-year visa for Australia – “much to the horror of my mother,” she says.  She met her husband, Graham Naughton ‘out bush’ where he was working as a horse-breaker, and “again to the horror of my mother” they married in Ireland and settled in Australia. 

Sarah freelanced for many years in graphics, cartooning and illustration, but six years ago she took up printmaking and it has become her passion.  She uses the linocut technique, in which a design is cut into the surface of a sheet of linoleum, with the raised (i.e. uncarved) areas presenting a mirror image of the parts to be printed.  The lino is inked and then impressed onto the paper, fabric etc.  “A lot of people comment that I ‘specialise in the detail’, and I think that is down to my background in graphic design,” she says.  Sarah also prints onto husband Graham’s hand-crafted woodwork, and the two often exhibit combined works.  As a team, they have entered many competitions, and recently won an award through the Hervey Bay Regional gallery for a printed cushion and wooden bowl set.

“The gallery at Hervey Bay has been great to us,” Sarah says.  After having her prints exhibited at Hervey Bay, and several other regional galleries, Sarah had her first solo exhibition in Brisbane in September 2009.  Held at the Kiln Gallery in Paddington, fishFLOWERbeetle, was “a wry satirical look at our anthropocentric ways”.  The pieces from the show practically sold out, which “I was thrilled about,” says Sarah.  Each piece was accompanied by a short poem, such as the one above, which Sarah also performed to visitors to the exhibition.  “It is rather frightening and exciting,” she says of reciting the poems to an audience, “but I find it much more effective and interesting to show what a mob of idiots we all are and giving a laugh at same time – it’s not such a bitter pill.”

As secretary of Cooloola Coastcare, Sarah continues to find inspiration in our local environment.  A series of prints of brilliantly patterned fish came about after she attended a conference on vulnerable wetlands and became fascinated with the deep, dark waters of the unique patterned fens of the Cooloola region – the only subtropical patterned fens in the world.  She says: “I suddenly became deeply inspired at the thought of all these fish that might live in these waterholes, and had never been seen by humans.  What if there were fish down there covered with paisley patterns…?”

"There Must Be Something In The Water"

Visit Sarah’s wonderful world of creative creatures at www.smitchell.com.au