Sarah Nutley @ Piers Feetham Gallery

The appeal of Sarah Nutley’s  pictures lie in their size (many are 10”x8”, or smaller), and the quiet intensity with which a scale of mark is balanced against the salient features of a scene. They are ‘cabinet paintings’, each with the appeal of an Indian or Middle Eastern miniature. Poised, dignified, and self-contained, they might be anonymous works, painted into the walls of a Mughal palace, mementoes of a period of peaceful expansion and discovery, for there is no evidence of battles being fought, or wars being won. They are fine pieces of work, made with a rare attentiveness to appearance, though no single way of describing unifies the collection, and it is difficult to pin-point a theme. If a journey through life can be recorded in terms of its resting places, each moment of stillness and contemplation might find its own decorated niche, and each beautifully coloured recess might easily be the space of one of these works.