Sarah Mottram

Who is Sarah Mottram?

Is she a new name in Melbourne’s art-scape? Or has she been here all along quietly, persistently creating?

Sarah Mottram is not an emerging artist in the traditional sense. She is a long-standing, largely unacknowledged force within the arts community, a prolific practitioner of profound sensitivity and vision who has spent the past two decades making, painting, thinking. Her art is born not of spotlight but of necessity; not of patronage but persistence. In the absence of support or recognition, Sarah continued creating. Often, there was no foot in the door. Often, there was no door at all.

But there was always the work.
And what astonishing work it is.

Rich, expansive, complex, her paintings are dazzling treasures of imagination and longing, conjured in the margins of time and space. Created not for applause, but because something deep and elemental compelled her. No matter what life threw at her Sarah painted. The harder life became, the brighter her paintings shone.

Embellished with the rarest of stones and symbols like Fabergé eggs, golden shields,  and daggers suspended in galaxies, her worlds are tapestries of impossible beauty. They offer escape routes to freedom through fantastical architectures of the soul. Galactic cathedrals, treasure maps, sacred relics—all in pursuit of spiritual liberation that only art can offer. In the eye of imagination, where everything is possible, Sarah drew herself a way out. She drew herself into a beautiful and magical world of her own.

There are no people in her paintings. No faces. Yet a human presence hums through every surface, as if we are inside Sarah’s pulsing veins, her racing thoughts, and her dreaming eyes. At times, we soar through her mind like Chagall’s floating lovers above impossible cities. But more than anyone, Sarah reminds us of Gaudí, if Gaudí had only painted.

Sarah’s love of architecture is wild and irreverent,  comprising fractured surfaces and mosaics of another dimension. Her sacred geometries feel refracted through the stained-glass windows of a future Sagrada Família rendered in light, AI, and space. There are no painted angels, but they are palpable, streaming down like light gracing you with awe, belief, and wonder, whether you're a believer or not.

That is Sarah in a nutshell: quiet, delicate, but made of extraordinary inner strength. Her secret weapon is art and her works are not just paintings—they are shields, talismans, weapons of the imagination. Daggers and snakes recur like secret emblems, her creative arsenal. Her imagination is her armour. Her quiet power, unshakable, never to be taken away no matter what hardships and injustices come her way.

Sarah builds magic not for recognition but because she has light to shine. She gifts us entire universes, generously and fiercely, and in doing so, restores  our faith  and belief in art and humanity. 

* * *

Emergence of Everything All at Once exhibition at Goldstone Gallery is Sarah Mottram’s first solo presentation in over 14 years. It arrives not with the pomp of an art world debut, but with the quiet thunder of recognition long overdue. It is a return, a resurrection, a full-circle galactic event—coincidentally opening on June 10, exactly 14 years to the day of her first and only previous solo exhibition. This is not just an exhibition; it is a moment of rebirth.

At its heart, this show is a chronicle of persistence. It gathers together works painted over many years—some begun and abandoned, then rediscovered and completed. The exhibition includes a monumental architectural painting from Sarah’s VCA graduate year, now held in the JAHM Museum collection, and loaned for this occasion to bookend a body of work that tracks not just formal development but spiritual evolution.

Sarah’s biography reads like a sequence of thresholds crossed. Her earliest memories are of drawing reptiles on butcher’s paper, inspired by National Geographic. Her adolescence unfolded in an off-grid treehouse above Snake Gully, immersed in the wild, in dialogue with the natural world. Her father and uncle, both aeronautical engineers, embedded in her a language of mechanics, infrastructure, and flight.

From these beginnings came her lifelong fascination with architecture, not only as structure, but as metaphor. Buildings as bodies. Buildings as blueprints for survival. Living off-grid taught her that every structure is a creative act. Nothing is fixed. Everything is in flux.

Her time at the VCA, supported by devoted mentors, brought refinement to her vision. She explored abstraction, aerial views, negative space. The discovery of the Architecture Library was pivotal: archival fragments, transparent layers, and projection became key tools in reimagining form and dimension. 

But it was motherhood that transformed her practice most dramatically. As a sole parent since 2012, studio time vanished. So, Sarah adapted. She began painting small tiles as they were portable, fragmentary, cumulative. These allowed her to work in slivers of time, assembling vast works over years. Her studio became a map of thoughts, photographs, and stored memory.

These tile works, central to the exhibition, speak of time not as linear but as layered, cyclical. Each is a microcosm of resilience and reflection. Some were painted years before reaching completion. They are slow and fragile, yet deliberate acts of survival, gestures of beauty made against all odds.

* * *

I first met Sarah in 2009. We often found ourselves on the same tram from St Kilda to the VCA. Later, I glimpsed her only through social media. Then, about a year ago, Sarah asked me to mentor her. But “mentorship” is too grand a word for what was needed. Sarah didn’t need teaching, she needed seeing. She needed someone to witness her, to remind her that she is extraordinary. That’s all I did. I saw Sarah. I saw her work. And I told her, again and again, every day that her work is magnificent.

Emergence of Everything All at Once exhibition is a gift to the audience, to the city, to anyone who has laboured in silence. Sarah Mottram’s work reminds us of what art can be when it is untethered from fashion and fame. Her paintings are acts of magic, of healing, of survival. They shimmer with inner light and an unbreakable truth: imagination is a force no system can extinguish.

Sarah is not new.
She was always here.
We just hadn’t looked closely enough.
Now we do.
And what we see is nothing short of wonder.