Sarah Walmsley graduated with her Master’s in Fine Art Sculpture in April 2018, following her BTech in Fine Art Sculpture (cum laude) at Nelson Mandela University. Walmsley’s work offers a revised approach to the sculptural female nude. Her emotive sculptures gracefully bear the weight of their experience as they communicate with each other and their viewers. Through these sculptures, she aims to represent women, by women, in the way they have elected to be represented. She creates her sculptures in the mediums of bronze, glass and resin. Through the body language and essence of her sculptures combined with the mediums in which they are create, she has addressed themes of memory, absence and presence, loss and the female identity using the female body as an allegory and conduit for expression. Initially focusing on self-portraits and now in her most recent body of work “By Women, for Women” including portraits of various female figures. Walmsley’s work addresses the ways in which the female body has been voyeuristically represented in art and aims to reclaim the female ‘nude’ and self-portrait, through representations of ‘naked nudes’ and authentic portraits of women by a female artist. These portraits aim to honour and celebrate the power, strength and beauty of women and represent their intersectional identities. Walmsley explores the self-portrait as a mode of processing identity, memory and as an assist to navigate the process of grieving the loss of mothers and mother-figures in a personal context. Biography Sarah Walmsley was born in Port Elizabeth and completed her BTech in Fine Art Sculpture (cum laude) in 2015 and graduated with her Masters in Fine Art Sculpture from Nelson Mandela University in April 2019. Walmsley has taken part in over 60 group exhibitions across South Africa including the nation-wide top 50 All Womxn Matter finalist exhibition, Absa L’Atelier and Sasol New Signatures top 100 finalist exhibitions and has just been accepted into the Chateau d’Orquevaux Artists Residency in France. Her artworks are in private collections around the world and can be viewed on the online gallery platform of StateoftheART Gallery. She had her first solo exhibition with StateoftheART Gallery in Cape Town in April 2018, her second solo exhibition with Gutsche Family Investments (GFI) Gallery in Port Elizabeth/Gqeberha in October 2022, and third solo exhibition at Art@Africa Gallery, Cape Town. She is the proud winner of the first All Womxn Matter art competition hosted by Julie Miller African Contemporary Art Gallery and Art@Africa Gallery. Sarah Walmsley was the featured artist in issue 67 of the South African Artist Magazine (2022). Walmsley lectured at Nelson Mandela University, in the Department of Art and Design from 2015-2019 and from 2020-2022 was the head of Visual Art at Collegiate Girls’ High School in Port Elizabeth. Walmsley now runs her own Art & Wellness business titled Art with Heart and pursues her career as a practising artist from Gqeberha, Eastern Cape, South Africa.