Schooldays were not the happiest days of Sarah Money’s life. As an undiagnosed dyslexic she suffered belittling comments from some teachers. ‘She will struggle in her career’, one scathingly wrote on a report:
‘What a thing to say about a child,’ recalls Sarah, as she takes a breather in her rustic studio deep in the Bentley Estate at Halland, near Lewes. It’s an idyllic setting for both the 62-year-old artist and her gardener husband Simon Timothy, the son of All Creatures Great and Small actor Christopher Timothy. It also belies Sarah’s slow burn route to fulfilling a suppressed ambition to become a professional artist and sculptor; recently showcased in a one-woman show at the Star Brewery Gallery in Lewes.
The sculptures reflect Sarah’s affinity with the human body, rhythm and movement; all a long-standing part of her life. She creates the heads from models and the figures emerge from life drawing and inventiveness.
‘I start by making sketches, either with pencil and paper or with clay maquette, or model,’ she says. ‘Having established a feel for the model I then begin work on the final piece. I start by building layers of clay, beginning with the overall shape of the sculpture and then creating more detail. Once the sculpture is finished it is hollowed out and left to dry and then fired for the first time. When firing a new sculpture anything can happen, cracking or even an explosion, but if all goes well, I will have a biscuit-fired piece then I fire again, stone-firing, at a higher temperature.’
Sarah dislikes ‘stuffy’ work and prefers loose and intuitive sculptures, an ethos also reflected in her floral paintings executed on canvas or board. These are not still life flowers, but what she describes as ‘the idea of a flower’ created from memory and imagination.
‘Often I’ll begin by covering the canvas with a plain, neutral colour, usually grey,’ she explains. ‘I don’t often start with any fixed idea or subject in mind. If I do, that idea or subject can often shift and change. I use oil paints as they produce the kind of texture and the vibrancy I love. I build the layers of paint, scrape them away, add, take away, until something that is pleasing to my eye is revealed. Once the painting is dry, I sometimes add glaze to enhance the colour.’
Prior to first selling her work just over a decade ago, Sarah’s diverse career took her from hairdressing and beauty to the world of theatre and teaching Pilates.
‘I grew up in a small Oxfordshire village and went to a tiny school which was not particularly good but very beautiful,’ she says. ‘We used to pick flowers and play games but didn’t really learn much. But I was dyslexic, which wasn’t really a thing in the 1960s.
Looking back, Sarah recognises an artistic flair in her family’s DNA, including maternal grandmother who played the piano by ear and her opera singing father.
‘He had a lovely tenor voice and was singing in the house continually, which I didn’t appreciate as a teenager but do now,’ she says. ‘He won awards and was offered a scholarship but didn’t take it up as it didn’t pay enough and he had a young family. I’m the youngest of three sisters and both of them were really creative. My big sister painted amazing murals and landscapes in the house and my middle sister did dance and mime.’
Sarah, who moved to East Sussex 30 years ago, admits she found school ‘confining’, compounded by the oft-negative reports. Then came the formative turning point when a secondary school art teacher put some clay in her teenage hands.
‘She saw there was something [in me], and working in 3D suddenly made sense to me. It was an incredible moment. I created things from my imagination or from images and things I’d seen on TV. My teacher just ran with it and said I must do art O-Level. I didn’t think too much of it as I was just enjoying myself.
‘I have still got the first piece I did, a thin little man sitting on a rock, which is similar to some of the pieces I do now. I got my art O-level, while there were other exams I didn’t even go to. While I turned a corner with the O-level, and my teacher said I should go to art school, it went by the wayside and as a teenager I probably wouldn’t have listened anyway. It morphed into other artistic things I did, but clay didn’t come back until I was in my 40s.’
Sarah studied beauty and hairdressing at college, but remembers sitting in the refectory gazing longingly at art students.
‘I would look at their table and think that’s where I should be and knowing, deep down, I was meant to be somewhere else,’ she says.
She then studied contemporary dance and mime, appearing in shows and festivals in the UK and abroad, and tried her hand at silver smithing and jewellery making. Later, she followed her parents back to their Sussex roots, after they relocated to be closer to other family members.
‘Moving to Brighton was an awaking of the art scene and a very important moment,’ she explains. ‘I then did an art degree as a mature student at the University of Brighton. I had two children and was a single parent but I had a very supportive family. I knew I should have gone to art college and it was a very deep calling. The interview was in the university building in the Old Steine and walking in for the first time remains such a strong memory, with the smell of the oil paints, the art and the movement and dance. I thought, “I’m home”.’
‘I hadn’t done an art foundation, so coming into a degree was challenging but it was so good. We used to do a Pilates class, which I loved, and after the degree I did a Pilates diploma in London, just when people were getting to know about it, and I have been teaching for more than 20 years.’
Finally, Sarah returned to her first love of clay. The catalyst was finding one of the old school reports kept by her mother.
‘As well as the comments saying I’d struggle, I read what the art teacher said about having a gift. I had forgotten about how much I loved clay. I went to the Paddock Art Studios in Lewes to hone my skills with Rose Beale, who is a brilliant teacher. Everything I had done when I was 16 came back, but this time I knew much more about movement and the body from my work and other studies.
‘My painting came a couple of years later. I’d always done a bit with charcoal but the beginning of my painting journey came from a moment with my grandson. We were painting together, and he was about two at the time, and I looked at him and thought there was such an amazing freedom there. I had forgotten how nice it was just to be free when you paint and use colour. So that’s how it started.’
Prior to moving to Bentley Estate, once the home of the Bentley Wildfowl and Motor Museum, Sarah lived in Chiddingly and put sculptures on show outside her house during the annual village festival. She later took part in events including the Sussex Artwave festival. As well as taking commissions, Sarah now sells sculptures and paintings through her website (sarahmoneyartist.co.uk) and outlets including Brighton’s BouSham Gallery. Her sculptures start from £100 with paintings from £200.
Recently, the Brighton restaurant Terre a Terre bought one of her paintings and Sarah is hoping to expand into selling her work into commercial premises.
A typical day will see Sarah take her Labradoodle Balou for a walk around the woods near her home before settling into work in her studios - one for sculptures, the other for paintings - and dealing with admin and anything else that crops up in between.
‘I love multi-tasking and with my work I don’t like to stay still for too long,’ she says. ‘I like to keep things moving and come out of my comfort zone.’
She is already planning another one-woman exhibition in 2025 and remains motivated by a comment made when she was starting out at the Chiddingly Festival.
‘A man homed in on one of my pieces and said: “This is interesting, you’ve got something here and you need to stay with this. A lot of people stop because they give up”. He told me never to give up and to keep going. This meant so much to me and I never gave up and I never will. I am an artist and I can’t do anything else and I won’t retire, that’s not going to happen.’
